Fischer's Children
by Burnout'83
Summary: Astro archaeologist from a distant future exploring an ancient human Martian settlement discovers old TDE communication port. It's a message from Commander Phillips requesting the help of any future colonists who have TDE . She warps her ship to jump and picks up a very surprised John Reese. She is unaware Cameron hasn't "explained" a thing about herself to John. Starcrossed cont.
1. Chapter 1

Fischer's Children

If you want to make any sense of this I strongly suggest reading "Star-Crossed" first.

"_There's another freezer room, almost identical to this…this one's racked with cadavers…all cooked and in varying states of dissection…They look like they were fried inside-out when they were fired through…we think he was calibrating mass- energy ratios prior to using the TDE … Moving into Room Two-Fuck! These are…kids… Sir… I'm picking up pulses, respiration, brain activity- they're not dead like the others; they are in stasis." _

I was just eighteen and in my final year at Esperanza .Up until then I'd had an unusual life, at least by comparison to other kids. It hadn't seemed totally weird to me, more like I'd expected it to happen, so when it did I wasn't surprised, if that makes sense. Cameron? … call me naïve, but at the time I honestly believed she worked as an intelligence officer for a government security agency.

It was claimed Mr. Fischer and I had been arrested in a military complex. Our status went from me, an ordinary student and him a respected college lecturer, to us being Category "A" suspected terrorists. Cameron's commanding officer threw a fit of paranoia. He drugged and interrogated Mr. Fischer and myself. I had almost no recollection of the night of our arrest, the location of where we'd been found, or our original reason for being in there. He sent us home like a couple of twenty four hour binge drunks with a vague, hazy recollection of where we'd been the night before. Then Scarface put Cameron's entire team on us for a surveillance operation.

The basis of Cameron's story, as she told it to me; she'd been taken in by the agency from a young age, had a rough time and missed out a lot in her life. Her commanding officer was a full blown career psychopath and she, Hitch and Del scavenged and grabbed what they could from life in spite of him. He'd had an affair with her and dumped her a few years back.

Cameron told me her team had worked out pretty much from the start that I and Mr. Fischer were not terrorists, so they used our cases to grab a few weeks free time for themselves in LA. I had no reason to disbelieve them, the only recall of Cameron's CO, the man I'd called "Scarface", was him twisting the muzzle of a 9mm Browning into my forehead, and me being so scared I'd pissed on his boots. It was Cameron's team's way, or rather "our" way of getting one up and back at the psycho-bastard. If you knew Cameron, you'd fall it, it's exactly what I'd needed her to tell me.

I sensed, or hoped, Cameron liked me, but I always believed at the back of mind she was just messing with me. Maybe she'd been catching up on what she'd missed out on in her life so far, maybe it was part of the act to keep me in line, make the boyfriend-girlfriend deceit easier, perhaps it was a combination of those things. She was in her late twenties, I was the kid she never got to go out with when she was younger, she was bored, I was available-who was I to complain? At least that's what I told myself when I was with her.

When she and her team left to return to "normal duties," I didn't show it, but that day it felt like my heart was being cut out of my chest with blunt cold steel. That night I climbed into to bed fully-clothed, fell into a fitful sleep, and when I woke up I hoped it'd all been a dream, which of course it wasn't, and I still felt the same, perhaps worse. I did a lot of moping, and I'm not ashamed to say, crying.

Before she stopped being a teacher at Esperanza and took up her new position my mom set up a special class for the most severely disabled kids in our neighborhood. They were the kids which no other school would take in, and because no one had attempted to offer them an education before, the majority opinion held they were in varying states of vegetative brain impairment, so why bother? What that attitude didn't reflect was the isolation, the sense of hopelessness, the same day-to-day routine grinding boredom of demand upon the parents who were caring for these children and how it stunted the kids' potential for development.

This was all happening around the month before my arrest. When the funding came through, mom had insisted on Mr. Fischer organizing and running the class. All I understood at the time was he was deeply committed and caring man. Mom took up her new post leaving Mr. Fischer in charge of the disability project.

It was Mom's and Rob's idea that I should help Mr. Fischer; he needed students to volunteer as classroom assistants. I half-suspected they hoped I'd meet a nice caring girl, start dating her, and I'd forget about Cameron. The class started the week she'd left.

I didn't believe mom ever really liked Cameron, but of course at the time I had no idea of the powerful undercurrent of animosities and fears that were really going on beneath the surface or the history behind it. All I knew is the day Cameron left, mom closed the door, gave a massive, grateful sigh of relief , only stopping short of saying out loud," thank god for that".

The class itself was an hour long and it ran after school. I had been warned I might need a pair of earplugs until I became used to the volume, and it wasn't a good idea for me to wear my best clothes. They weren't joking; it was a cacophony of noise and riot of multi-colored paint. The first thought that came to mind was that I'd stepped into a day-nursery for overgrown toddlers.

I followed Mr. Fischer as he picked his way over the floor. It was covered in crash mats and we trod carefully through gaps between the parents who were working with their kids. Some were in little groups singing and playing musical instruments, like tambourines and shakers, together, others were guiding their kid's hands as they held paintbrushes. Some were building structures from wooden blocks. This special class was one of the rare opportunities they had to meet up and do anything as group and I could feel how lonely it must have been for most of them not to have this kind of place to come to.

Mr. Fischer handed me a hard-cover children's book and told me the mom and child I'd be working with wanted me to read with them.

Ellie was the child I was working with. She was lying on her back staring up at the ceiling. Her mom kneeled next to her. Ellie reminded me of an infant, lain out on the lawn, on a rug on a summer's day, watching the clouds roll by, her eyes brimmed with the same curiosity and wonder. 

Ellie's mom gestured for me to sit down with them. She explained Ellie had suffered brain damage at birth; she wasn't able to sit up on her own. She'd never hold a proper conversation and she'd be in diapers for the rest of her life.

Ellie's hands were covered in snot and dribble. Her mom cleaned them off with a wipe. She showed me how to prop Ellie up against my side. I put my arm around her and she leaned back against me. I opened the book and held it so we could both see the page.

It was called a "First Book of Space". Ellie put finger on the page and ran it around and over the yellow orb of the sun. I read the text," This is the sun. It's big ball of burning gasses. All the planets in our solar system go around the sun." Ellie stared at the page as if she were gazing through a porthole in a space craft.

Her mom must have been satisfied I was a suitable volunteer because she gestured to the back of the room. There was a coffee machine and a table for parents to meet up and have a break. I guess it was for some of them the only time-out and chat they got during a busy week.

I carried on reading to Ellie and by the time we reached Jupiter I'd become so engrossed in the whole thing I hadn't realized how long I been there. Ever had the sense you were being watched? It broke my concentration; I glanced up and noticed a woman had come into the room. She was in a wheelchair and she'd parked up at the side of Mr. Fischer's desk. They were watching, discussing me and Ellie.

The woman kept her shoulder length in Rasta-style dreads tied at the ends with multi-color beads. She wore a pair of dark glasses. I couldn't see much of her face. Beyond that I didn't pay much attention to her. I assumed she was a disability officer from the LA Department of Education, checking up to see what we were spending their funding on. Besides, my attention was returned to Ellie when she growled in her throat and dug her fingernails into my wrist. It didn't hurt. When she came back to join us, Ellie's mom laughed and told me Ellie usually did that when she was enjoying something. When I glanced at Mr. Fischer's desk, the woman had gone. I read the whole book to Ellie, cover to cover three times.

After the class finished I hung around a while because I wasn't in the mood for meeting up and talking with the other students. They were from different classes to me and I didn't know any of them except by sight. When they'd gone I went out of the building and cut across the parking lot towards the school gates. Apart from a few stragglers, parents from the class getting wheelchairs into SUVs, and the girls' soccer team practicing on the pitch, the new glass and steel buildings were empty and quiet.

I followed a girl and boy heading home, walking with together their arms entwined. I saw my own singular- self's reflection in the mirror of glass in the science block. Like a shadow it kept pace with me, disappearing on concrete then reappearing in the next frame windows. I tried not to think about Cameron. If I'd learned anything from helping out in the class it was how much strength and courage people have facing real adversity. I was just some love-struck teenager pining over what I shouldn't have had in the first place. She was incredible, a one-off experience, I honestly believed she was never coming back.

I didn't hear the car until it pulled up .There was a light crunch of gravel directly behind me and it stopped level. It was a wheel-chair converted silver Porsche Cayenne, with a hybrid motor. The driver was the woman I'd see talking Mr. Fischer in the class,

"John Reese can I have a word with you please?"

Her voice was husky like a hundred-a-day smoker's and she had trouble breathing. A fine plastic tube ran up from a gas bottle into her left nostril.

I closed the gap until I was a pace away from the open windshield .I hadn't been close enough to see this before, but her dark skin was pock-marked, pitted and scared down to bone. Jet-black shades covered her eyes. The interior of the cab smelled stale, like she'd been living and breathing in it for a week.

"So Odette left her ballet shoes under your bed?"

My heart banged in my chest and I heard the rush of blood in my ears that was the code Cameron had given if anyone from section 7 made contact with me. I stood there, mouth open thunderstruck.

"Would you get in please John, she asked me to bring you to her."

"Is she alright?" I managed to say.

"She's fine; at least she was when I received her message." She tilted her head; I could hear the open and close of the regulator on the gas bottle as she breathed. "Think about it Reese: she must be okay if she knew you were here, and you must have told her you were here."

"I didn't tell her I was here."

She coughed and I sensed she implied the stress I was causing made her lungs spasm, "Look just get in Reese will you, and there was lot of metal interference so I only deciphered a fraction of her message."

I climbed in the passenger's seat, dropped my schoolbag in the foot well.

"I'm Commander Fitzgerald; I know that's a mouthful, so call me Fitz."

It's when we pulled off and headed to the gates I realized the wheel was turning but she wasn't steering the car with her hands, nor were here any pedals under front of her chair. Her feet were on the rests of the chair.

"I had it converted, good old fashioned interface and USB cables," she pointed the wires running under the dash from the chair. "Relax."

We pulled out of the school gates and headed north away from downtown LA "Where is she?" I asked.

Fitz didn't answer. Instead she did something which changed my understanding of everything… forever. I heard her voice in my head, it happened without her moving her lips or speaking out loud. "Shit, it was a garbled message, I might have got this all wrong, what did Colonel Phillips tell you about herself?"

At that moment I think I would have tried to climb out of the car, had she not activated the central locking. She took off her shades; her eyes were nothing but oil- black meniscus. My next thought; this was a lucid nightmare, but it wasn't.

"Reese, I'm not from Section 7, I picked up the message, I'm here to deliver you. I'm sorry, I knew about Cameron and your history and I assumed she'd explained by now. Look I'm going be straight with you here John," She pointed to her face, the scars "I was caught outdoors Lacus Quadrangle, sand twister, ripped my face shield off, I crawled five hundred meters to the shelter. Good job I can breathe the atmosphere down there, right? I'm waiting for full reconstructive but the ship patched me up enough to function. I have to use a rover down here because I'm adapted to thirty-eight percent earth gravity, everything is so damn heavy."

I had no idea what she talking about, or indeed how I was even hearing her voice.

"You want to know what I was doing down in Lacus? Someone from about a hundred years earlier fired through and landed a connection port. Sounds like a conversation down two tins cans and a piece of string. I'm retired, I'm an archeologist, and I was tracing my family tree. Rare you find a connection port or anything down in The Lacus"

Her hands were not normal, instead of three joints, there were four and her nails were more like talons than fingernails.

"Alien," the thought irresistibly popped into my head like a cartoon speech bubble.

"Alien! …Reese, you know, that is such a loaded term."

There was a long silence, we were cruising behind a truck and when I looked out of the windshield the world out there seemed normal, when I turned back and saw Fitz, and the car driving itself it was like I imagined it could be if you were going crazy.

"So where do think Cameron is right now?" asked Fitz.

I spoke my words out loud; to do so still felt part of the 'normal'. "She said she was being posted somewhere in the Middle East, that's as much as we discussed." I didn't know what else to say

Fitz laughed and coughed. "She's not an 'alien', I can assure you the love of your life is one hundred percent indigenous specie to earth, so quit worrying about that."

We were on the Pasadena Freeway. The car accelerated and pulled out into the middle lane. I was already gripping the edges of my seat.

Fitz knew what I was thinking, "Relax, I grew up in a simulator, I can drop an interstellar wormhole into Earth-geostationary, bitch to reverse into some ports though."

The needle on the Cayenne stayed rock-steady at exactly sixty miles an hour.

"So what do think to Ellie?" she asked.

"I liked her, I enjoyed the class."

Fitz sighed, there was sort of gurgling sound in her throat.

"If I bring you back, right here eight AM tomorrow, you'll teach her again, keep going in to help out?"

May brain wouldn't work, too much to take in, I sat in stunned silence, listening to the soft regular hiss of the respirator, whilst the car ghosted along in near silence.

"Hey, let's talk- I'm not abducting you or anything here." Fitz laughed again, this time culminating in a near choking fit. She gripped my wrist to steady herself , dug her nails, lightly into my skin, and waved her free hand in the air, "… can't breathe this shit down here for too long without a full suit, too much oxygen…so about Ellie?"

I needed to say something, "Yeah, I'll teach her again."

Fitz gave me a long hard look, sat back in her chair and slipped her shades back on. "My ship's parked over the… I'll take you to Commander Phillips."

We didn't 'talk' for a while. My back was covered in cold sweat. Fitz wrapped her fingers on the dash. I heard her voice in my head again.

"John, the one thing that never struck me until I scanned the file on Mr. Fischer's hard drive this afternoon: Every single one of those kids in that class was adopted and placed with their families. So where do you think they originally came from?"


	2. Chapter 2

_Thank you very much for reading this story. It might help to remember Star-Crossed was originally a series of, sometimes,unrelated 'sketches' with a loose plot. It was fun writing it._

_ This an exercise in first-person storytelling, and me trying to produce sharp, vivid description as well as sticking to a very tight, definite plot._ _It is not_ easy, _so let me know how I'm doing._

_John is taken to Cameron, but he isn't told who she is. I think you might like this._

Eventually Fitz pulled off the highway on one of the northerly intersections. She headed east on a tourist route, for a while we were queuing in the lines of holiday makers' caravans and trailers, heading for weekend chalets and campsites in the Sierra

After a few miles she took us into a network of back roads where the volume of traffic thinned to a few cars and the route took us deeper into the woodland of the National Forrest. We followed it along the bank of a river and crossed over a metal road bridge. From there we climbed up a steep hill, driving up through fir and pine woods on twisting hairpin bends. When I looked over the edge at the side of the road I caught glimpses of the thread of the shimmering river snaking between the boulders down in the bottom of the ravine, its swirl-pools, and white rapids shooting over the edges of the falls.

We carried on up into the higher ground where the trees became sparse, giving way to open scrub-land, sand and rock. On the skyline ahead of us, a fleet of helicopters swarmed like bees around an open hive. They were buzzing the ridge of the summit and ahead I could make out the line of cars, trucks and agricultural vehicles waiting to get through the roadblock. Red and blue lights flashed. Drivers and passengers stood around at the roadside whilst National Guardsmen searched through their vehicles and possessions, emptying their things out on the side of the road, rifling through them.

Fitz brought the Porsche to a halt and hissed through her teeth. She took a deep breath before she spoke out loud, "they know I'm here… this shouldn't be happening, the shuttle's in geostationary, it' shielded … maybe it bumped a piece of space junk off-course but it shouldn't have done."

She nervously glanced in the rear-view. When I looked over my shoulder I saw more emergency lights through the trees behind us another group of National Guard vehicles heading up the road towards us, potentially cutting off our exit.

"It's a full-scale bug hunt… this is serious Reese. Of all the damn places I've been…I can't risk being caught down here and I can't run anywhere in this thing!" she banged the side of the wheelchair in sheer frustration.

Fitz three-point turned the car so it faced back down the hill. It was about a twenty-five, thirty percent gradient. She stared at fixed point; a hundred yards ahead where the road took a sharp left and a rusting corrugated metal barrier jutted out of the rock at the top of the ravine. Its painted chevrons had long weathered off and we could see blue sky through the holes that had rotted in it.

I had every understanding of where this was going. My hands started to shake and I felt waves of pure visceral terror rising through my body.

Fitz almost shouted, in my head, - "Glove compartment, above your knees, there's a knife - pass it to me."

It was a small Smithsonian Museum souvenir pen knife with about a three-inch blade. Fitz held the little knife in the palm of her left hand and closed her fingers around it, she shook the knife as if she was willing good luck into a pair of dice before they rolled.

She held her free hand out to me, and there it was; an arm and outstretched alien "claw" in front of my chest. This was real and it was happening. The lights of the Guards' vehicles coming up the hill were less than a half a mile away and closing on us .We were about to plunge two thousand feet over the edge of a ravine and all I could think of was that shimmering thread of river and the boulders down there.

"Reese-we use a gravity well for emergency evacuation. We need to be up in mid-air. If we lift off from here it'll pull half the road up with us… hold my hand?"

"Hold your hand? You're crazy and I don't want to die here," I thought.

She yelled back at me, in my head, "I want you to hold my hand because I'm fucking scared! John, on the count of three, we don't have a choice."

Fitz revved the engine, she was about to dump the clutch.

"What…are you fucking serious Fitz?"

She took her shades off, gripped my hand and glared at me straight in the eyes, hers were coal black and angry. "Do you want to see Cameron ever again? If you don't, you get the hell out of my SUV now, you run away down that hill and you keep on running 'till you reach home, I'm not getting captured down here for her or you Reese."

I never vocalized my answer. I didn't have to, what I felt about Cameron was too deep and beyond ordinary words, but we both knew what my answer was. If she'd told me Cameron was in hell, that moment, I'd have started digging.

"Then brace up," she said calmly.

I counted with Fitz-"one…two…."

At "three" she floored it .The engine gusted down the hill, the barrier appeared to race up toward us. I kept my eyes open as long as I could. Moments before impact she shouted out to her ship,"Vyaak, lock and lift, now!"

We didn't make it –that old, rusting iron barrier was stronger than she'd guessed. Its posts bent but they didn't give. The Porsche bounced off the corrugated metal with a sickening crunch. Airbags popped like firecrackers, exploding and ballooning out, soft-punching and forcing us upright into our seats. The windshield shattered into a million fragments. We span on the grit and when we came to a halt radiator steam hissed into the cabin from under the crumpled hood. The fender had been torn off and it lay on the edge of the road under the barrier along with the broken headlight glass and other parts of the Porsche's front end.

Fitz desperately strained and fumbled around under the airbags as she scrabbled for the ignition key. She tried to restart the engine, to reverse back for a second attempt to drive the Porsche over the edge, the starter motor whinnied and whined, fuel pipes pumped raw diesel over the hot engine through the broken bank of injectors. The smell of fuel filled the cab, stung my eyes and I heard the thud of an approaching Apache helicopter's rotors overhead, and I saw, though the sparse, stunted trees the blue and red emergency lights of the National Guard trucks approaching us, up the hill. They were only two hairpins away.

Fitz desperately called her ship again," Vyaak, just do it, get us out. Cover you face John", she yelled at me.

I placed my arms and rested my head on top of the air bags and turned my face away from her, but I kept one eye open through the side windshield.

It's hard to describe what a being inside a gravity well is like. Try to imagine a long opaque tube of energy; one end is connected to the loading bay of a shuttle craft, the other stretches down to the ground on earth. It's like a vacuüm cleaner hose, except you're creating a gravity vacuüm instead of one using differentials of air pressure. You are kept in an area of normal atmosphere it's like a cylindrical section of everything around you within the tube, all of which will rise. Waiting to take off is like you're a round in a chamber, about to be blasted from the barrel of a gun. Add an inverse-gravity "energy hoist" coupled to a black hole engine into the equation and you'll have an idea how fast you will be moving.

The lift-off is slow and incremental, it's like being gently tugged up by an airship. The steaming Porsche, bits of car, windscreen glass, the barrier, which groaned as the posts ripped out of the concrete, chunks of tarmac road went up with us. Then the hoist began pulling, and we, and all the junk and debris were dragged up and accelerated .There is no G-force, you're kept at one G, normal gravity, and the sensation is one of effortless, ever-increasing powerful upward momentum. It'stotally silent.

After a minute or so we burst out of the cloud into the blue and upwards into the thinning sky and then into the black .Bits of debris, gobs of diesel bobbed around with us like flotsam. At that point, I heard Fitz telling me we were "approaching Mach four-zero, the peak of our acceleration curve". We slowed above the silver-grey edge of my planet's atmosphere and I saw the tops of clouds over the pacific blue curve of the earth against the black of space.

The shuttle craft's loading bay doors opened, we went up and in. when they closed , we hovered in mid-air an inch or so above them, the "hoist" disconnected, and the well shut itself down .We landed on the deck with a bump, on four wheels, amidst a clatter of falling debris. Because we were in a lower atmosphere the airbags expanded strained and pushed harder against me until I could hardly inflate my chest to breathe. I heard a pop and rush of gas, then another. Fitz was bursting the bags with the pocketknife.

When she was free Fitz, ripped the tube out of her nostril, opened the door and staggered out of the car onto the deck. She bent over, with her hands on her knees gasping in huge gulps of the shuttle's atmosphere. She coughed and spat into the sand and glass we'd dragged up from the ground and was strewn under her feet. She reached inside the side pocket of the door, pulled out a bottle of water, swilled her mouth out and spat a ribbon of it that landed with a splash on the floor. She took her jacket off rolled it into bundle and threw it into a corner. She was sweating profusely.

I hadn't attempted to move yet. I was still belted in my seat, covered in broken glass and splats of deasil with flaccid air bags draped over my knees. The radiator had emptied out and stopped steaming .When I raised my hand it was as if it moved through water, creating ripples and eddies in the air around me.

She was still bent double and gasping for breath ,she spoke in my mind in a calm, clear voice," Are you alright Reese?"

"What is this? I asked, watching the flux swirl around me.

"I breathe carbon dioxide, 98%, it'd kill you, that's an atmosphere filter, we're giving you oxygen rich Earth-type, it's like arm… an energy suit. Unclip your belt, get out."

I did as she said .When I stood up everything moved too fast. I banged my head on the inside of the roof of the SUV. It was cushioned, it didn't hurt, but it made me sit back down again.

Still bent double, waved her hand out from behind her and laughed, "Don't move so fast, this is 38% Earth gravity." She laughed, it sounded human.

Fitz, stood up straight and walked over to a rectangular "window" in the side of the shuttle wall, as she approached it became transparent. She waved her hand for me to come over and join her. I picked my way between the junk scattered across the shuttle's deck, the sound of and sand and glass crunching under my sneakers.

Out of the window I saw a small flotilla of satellites and space drones they glowed like insects when they caught in the beam of the sun. They were wandering around the area of space we were in. They couldn't see us, or scan us, but ground controllers knew something was up here with them.

Fitz spoke to her ship again, "Vyaak, screw heat signature, get us out of here."

The shuttle turned and started to move away from earth. The stars were few, and the moon glowed bright ahead.

I couldn't tear myself away from the view, but it must have seemed routine to Fitz, because she turned her back to it and slid down the wall under the window She sat on the on the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees with her water bottle in her hand. She picked a small stone up off the floor and threw it .It bounced off the hood of the wrecked SUV.

After a while she said, "Look at my fucking Porsche, look at the mess in my shuttle!"

"Where are we going? Is Vyaak a member of your crew?" I asked

"I don't have a crew, Vyaak's my ship, I'm his pilot, and it's just me and him."

"Where is 'he'?"

"You won't see him yet. We have about twenty minutes to dock. He's as close as I dare bring him in."

Fitz gazed up at me with her oil-black eyes. Moonlight silvered her arms. She wiped the neck of the water bottle on her tank and handed it up to me. Despite being thirsty I hesitated before putting it to my lips.

"It's safe; I don't have any bugs, except ones I picked up down there." She patted the floor beside her." Come on sit down, space is boring." When I sat down like her with my back against the wall, she said, "So, eighteen minutes until we dock… you can enlighten me about Cameron Phillips."

I told her I wasn't stupid. I'd read a lot science fiction and theoretical math and physics. A black hole-engine "starship" could theoretically exceed light-speed, so why was she taking me to Cameron in an above light speed ship, if Cameron wasn't an "alien" or in another part of the universe? Why would she even be out there? Anyway, why was Fitz helping me?

Fitz butted her shoulder up against mine. I could feel her warm skin through oxygen-filter membrane around my body. It felt somehow normal, like when I had a heart to heart with Becks or Chelsea. She was wearing a white tank; her arms were thin like an ultra-long distance athlete's. I could see the scars and pit marks all over her shoulders and arms from where she shed been caught out in the open by the sand-twister on the surface of Mars.

"Hold my hand again," she said.

I held her hand and we sat with our backs to the wall in silence for a minute or two. She turned and looked at me; I read empathy and emotion in those strange eyes, like an animal's. I had no idea what she was about to tell me.

"John, I'm not doing this for you. Vyaak and me; there's a contract and a price for the work we do. Don't worry, you won't have to pay it now, but we will ask you for it when the time is right-and don't even ask how much, it's doesn't have a measurable monetary value… John… what I will tell about Cameron now is…she hasn't been born yet. She, Hitch and Delany; they are from earth but they are from one possible future, and that's where we're taking you." She raised her free hand to silence any more questions, "that is all I will say…so… tell me everything about her."

It was like the windscreen imploding all over again. I started trembling but at the same time I felt a rush of excitement, an intellectual enlightenment that made sense of the mystery of Cameron. Fitz put her arm around me and gave me a shoulder hug, and It didn't seem that weird sitting with an alien in a shuttle craft, the moon burning bright and incandescent white outside the window above my head and me telling her everything I hadn't been able discuss with anyone else, about the woman I loved . I needed to talk like that. She listened and 'saw' with her mind.

When I'd finished Fitz stretched her arms and stood up. I did too. We rested our elbows on a metal ledge under the viewing window. Mars from here seemed about the size of a soccer ball. Mars has two moons, which are arguably asteroids that had become caught in is gravity. Phoebus, the largest, looks like a sculpture of a rotting pomegranate cast in metal. It is about 28 Km across at its widest point. Behind Phoebus was an area of space, maybe three times the size of that little Martian moon, and it was as if that area had become detached from the rest of space. I cannot properly describe this, but every time I tried to look at it, it shifted perspective, the nearest thing I could think of to explain is a multi-dimensional complexity of hyper-cubes , except it was a number of shapes with differing planes and geometries which I saw moving and interacting all at once.

Fitz pressed her forehead against the window. "Don't worry he'll create four-dimensional space for us when we get on board. You can't see him with your eyes-you have to use your mind."

"What is that?" I asked.

"He's a class one destroyer."

"'He's' a warship?"

"He was…, until I stole him."

She sighed and ran her finger down the window tracing the outline of her ship." Vyaak's changed a lot since we've been together, but I'd still be wary of him near a populated system, that's why I have to use the shuttle."

"How do you pilot him?"

Fitz paused and though for a moment and then she shook her head. She broke into a big smile at my naïvety." Erm John, what does, say, erm, an earth-woman do to 'pilot' the male of your species?"

As she explained some of it, and it reminded me of when I was younger, and when I'd asked her, Chelsea had told me straight about the "facts of life".

"Vyaak," a 'class one', war weary, black-hole engine destroyer, was Fitz's lover, soul mate and life-partner.

* * *

><p>"This is all new John," Fitz said: Vyaak had created an earth-like bedroom for me. The floor and walls were like the rest of the four-dimensional space onboard; a ubiquitous graphite-gray and no windows or porthole. There was restroom and sink area. A change of clothes had been laid out on the sheet of the bed-black cotton (like) pants and a gray T, same clothes Fitz was wearing.<p>

We had to get out of the solar system and into open space before Vyaak could engage the drive systems that would take me forwards in time to Cameron. It would take about thirty-six hours. Too close, and the wake of Vyaak's engines would drag planets out of orbit and take them through with us, like a trawler's fishing nets. We were cruising out, way below light speed.

Fitz's room was across a hallway from mine. I'd been grazed with small cuts and bruises from the windscreen glass. After I washed in warm water at the sink and changed into the clothes, I crossed the hall and knocked on her door.

She looked up from a long work bench. There was box of pizza and water bottles which she'd picked up down in LA. They'd been in the trunk of the Porsche. She'd eaten half of the pizza already and she passed the box up to me. It was soggy-cold and the cheese topping was congealed and fatty, but I was very hungry. I sat down and ate and watched her as she worked.

She leaned over the bench obviously working with great concentration. There was a silver metal robotic skeleton laid out in bits and pieces laid out on the bench. She was cleaning it with a tiny vacuum hose that came out of the bench, sucking out particles of sand and dust from what looked like an elbow joint.

The robot's metal face reminded me of an Aztec death mask. There was what could have been bullet groove in the metal near a circular porthole in the side of its skull. It had a metal spine, joints and rods for limbs, and what appeared to be a highly armored, articulated torso. Fitz had been painstakingly cleaning and piecing it back together.

I found out later this is what Fitz had been down on the surface of Mars to excavate. She'd hastily gathered up what she could and dragged it back on a barrow to the shelter, to take cover from the incoming twister. The skeleton had slowed her down, which is why Fitz was so scarred up when it ripped through parts of her exo-suit. She'd crawled those five hundred meters roped and clinging onto the barrow, dragging it behind her through the sand. It was obviously highly valuable.

Back to the here and now: "So what are you working on, is that an alien?" I asked.

Fitz glanced up and resumed to vacuuming a piece of robot . "It's a she .There were only two of them ever made. She would be almost priceless to collectors on the open market but I'm not selling her though."

"What is it?"

"Basically she's an extremely intelligent, self-aware and intuitive, near indestructible war machine. This is a blend of Coltan and other alloys. Here, hold it gently, she's alive but in forced sleep mode, she doesn't know you are there." Fitz handed me the metal skull. It was human size and lighter than I imagined because I'd forgotten I was in 38% gravity. I traced my finger over the graze in the metal on the side of the skull

"What did this to her," I asked.

Fitz shrugged. "I don't know, maybe she didn't duck quickly enough one time."

I placed the skull back gently on the worktop in the faint red outline of dust where it had been.

"It'll be a long time before we reach open space. Why don't you sit down and help me put this back together… I have most of the original parts here and Vyaak can replicate the rest for us. You have to clean them really well first."

I sat down and used one of the vacuum hoses to extract the fine red dust and tiny bits of stone from around one of the hip joints. That's when I noticed the pelvic area into which the joint would fit had opening to accommodate a human-like female vagina and uterus.

"Robots have sex?" I half-meant it as a joke because I couldn't imagine how or why they did, even though she'd explained, I hadn't fully grasped or understand Fitz's relationship with her ship.

"Sometimes they do" Fitz said. She stopped work and frowned and sighed," more things in your little heaven and earth than you can imagine, Reese."

She stood up and turned her back to me. She pulled up her tank to her neck and held her dreadlocks to the side .From the top of her buttocks to the base of her skull were a series of openings, evenly spaced, running up either side of her spine and her neck. They were pink against her dark skin, their outer lips folded around themselves like closed, exotic flower petals; clearly small female sex organs. They were patches of fine pubic like hair around them.

"It's all right for you to look Reese, I'm another species. I wasn't born like this, this is part of a pilot's necessary surgery, and this is how we guide them when we jump…Jumping … it's self-annihilating like dying except… it's pleasurable…these are neural and other links when he joins with me." she said, leaving me to imagine the rest.

She rolled her tank down and sat down again. We didn't say anything for a while. I fitted pieces of the robot's femur and joint together , the parts clicked into place and locked like a precisely engineered rifle. The whole skeleton was a massive three-dimensional jigsaw.

"You'll get used to it Reese, one day and it'll all seem completely normal to you." She said, as if gently telling me to grow up.

I think this was the first time I started to comprehend where life and evolution was going. I swigged another mouthful of cold pizza down with the bottled water and carried on cleaning a robotic knee-joint, deep in thought.

"If you are not selling this robot what will you do with her?" I asked.

"She's too dangerous to keep on board without confinement. I'll take her back to where she came from, she'll insist on it any way."

"Where is she from?"

Fitz didn't answer. She passed me over a detached Coltan wrist and hand to clean.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3. **50.8° North Latitude. 330.7° West longitude.**

I realized Fitz was keeping me focused on practical tasks; I was the kid in the back seat of the SUV being kept quiet with a puzzle on a road trip, and maybe if she hadn't given me something to do,my head would have exploded with enormity of the situation.

Also, I was attempting to be polite, half-playing the role of the bemused guest, not wanting piss-off an alien host who happened to be the pilot of an interstellar destroyer. That's the main reason I sat down and helped her rebuild that 'robot', thinking_: maybe this is what aliens "do". _

It never occurred me to ask myself, " _out here, who exactly contracts a' retired' forensic archaeologist with a 'borrowed', above light speed ' Interceptor', with more than enough firepower to convert a planetary system into rings of ash and particles around a neutron star that was formerly its heliocentric sun_? That is not the kind of question that runs through your mind when you are is this situation, nor one you want to ask, at least not at first.

I'd figured out the robot had been designed and built to be extremely robust, yet simple to self- repair , and once I understood the patterns and grasped the principles underlying its design and build, exacting precise rods, joints and connections which twisted, screwed and clicked into place, perfectly . Apart from a some minor parts only its right wrist and hand were now obviously missing,

She told me it was near-enough ninety percent complete. I remarked how similar some aspects of its design and manufacture were to my step-father, Rob's basic designs for prosthetic limbs and I rattled on to Fitz about other cases of simultaneous invention, like calculus. She sat, listened, and probably politely pretended she was interested in my excited theorizations of inventive synergy within different groups in the evolution of science-Actually , I was trying to make some sort of conversation, and yes I was rattling-on.

Fitz announced it was time to put the robot back into safe storage because in some situations this model had the capacity to self- activate, and would it be extremely dangerous if it escaped and ran amok on her ship.

I remember thinking; that must be like, _out here_ _no one hears you screaming kind of dangerous_, because just handling and being in the same room with the damn thing in its inert state frightened the crap out of me. Ever seen electro-shock averse therapy, negative reinforcement? The hairs on my neck and forearms had raised up like needle points against my skin, I really didn't want to touch that thing, because everything about it told me it was a used weapon and it had killed and it would kill again.

When we left Fitz's room she wheeled the robot away, strapped down with thick metal bands on a kind of reinforced gurney. When Fitz came to what appeared be a dead-end she stepped through it and I was left standing in an empty corridor looking at a solid graphite-gray wall,.

I'd been warned not to try to wander beyond this confined area because, even if I could, her ship had a habit of rearranging its layout and reorganizing everything in it. For a "guest "it was very easy to become lost. Plus, she added, some sections were full of things, like_ highly_ _disturbed, hibernating military robots_ and my presence might agitate them so they'd probably wake up. The way she'd been talking about her "collections" made her sound more like an intergalactic arms dealer than an archaeologist, back then I didn't know the half of it.

I went into to my room, lay on my cot and stared at four walls. I thought, For god-sakes , I'm in a space craft! There are no windows, no observation decks, and there was zero sense of any speed or movement, I might as well be in a prison cell. I'd seen the moon out of the shuttlecraft but I wanted to see, experience …all of it.

I'd spent a lot of my childhood watching Sci-fi series and channels, my bookshelves were racked with Sci-fi books and graphic novels, and as Chelsea liked to tell everyone when she wanted to embarrass me , I'd kept the Star Wars wallpaper on my bedroom walls until I was thirteen. I only grudgingly moved out of my bedroom when she and her sister Backs were it by my mom, and the first thing they did was strip my wallpaper. Becks wrote, " JOHN REESE IS A NERD" on the bare plaster. it's still there under the pink candy stripe stuff they put up.

I lay on my cot and waved my hand around in front of my face The energy membrane rippled, and it became still when my hand was at rest. It might have calmed like flowing water, but I was anything but placid all I wanted, as much as gold prospector praying for a crack of reflected golden torch-light was to have one small glimpse of what was out there, beyond these four walls. It was burning me up.

When she came back Fitz picked up on my frustration ." Alright just this once," she said.

She led me down the corridor and out through a bulkhead wall in the hull , through which we walked though like a pair of ghosts and stepped onto the main deck of the ship. Fitz and I could have been two tiny ants crawling around in the dark on of aircraft carrier. We climbed up part of the ladders on a forward turret and sat on one of its lower gantry platforms , perhaps three miles back from the prow of the ship.

The forward shields speckled and flashed as Vyaak moved through the Heliosphere. It's almost the outermost region of the solar system ; rock and dust and lonely little moons without any planets of their own to orbit. The ship ploughed it like an icebreaker. A big chunk of asteroid impacted into the fore-shields and lit the deck with the brightness of a billion lumen flare, aurora ribbons of color, the electron rainbow, streamed over our heads and churned behind in his wake

It was all so… silent.

I must have had the wide-eyed excitement of a little kid at a Chinatown Firecracker display. Fitz didn't share it one bit, she put her hand over her mouth and suppressed a yawn. "Hey", she said, "want to 'hear' what my ship sounds like?"

I must have thought, " yes" because she relayed his "voice" to me, and I won't ever forget it. Imagine Death Metal vocals many octaves below normal auditory range but louder, direct into your head;a rock crushing roar and growling, way down in the depths of your mind, depths you didn't know you had before your heard it.

"What's he saying?"

She shouted back over the noise, "He wants to open up his engines, sprint out into interstellar. I'm holding him back."

It became louder until it hurt .I covered the sides my head to try block the noise.

She cut it and the sudden silence hissed white static.

" You hear that all the time?" I asked.

She didn't answer at first. I kept glancing at her out of the corner of my eye, she stared disinterestedly into the artificial meteor storm over the prow, her dark skin lit by the ochre and orange-reds, her jet- black eyes were aglow as if by the light of fires. When she spoke the start of a smile curled in corners her mouth. "His voice sounds like music to me," she said, and became quiet again. She was restless , angling to go back inside.

I tried to make conversation. "Where's the Sun?"

"Over there," she pointed it out. Behind us the sun was a pinhead of light, not really much brighter or more distinguishable from many of the un-twinkling stars which became briefly visible when the light show on the shields faded.

"Where's Sirius?"

"Actually I don't fucking know Reese, oh you know what? it should be...over there somewhere." She waved her hand in the general area of a visible star cluster.

I hadn't realized, and in my excitement I couldn't imagine how jaded she was by all this, so I carried on," Which star system do you come from?" I asked, half-expecting her to point star and give the big speech about it , like aliens do in the movies.

Instead she replied, "What's it matter? It's not as if you want to go there, is it?"

"I was curious."

She gave long mental sigh, "It's just a planet, exactly the same as yours."

I waited for her to tell me some more, anything, but she sat quietly with the green and red fire colors of the overhead electron storm flickering around her. She pulled her jacket tighter around her and pushed her hair back so her dreads fell over her collar. After a couple of minutes she stood up, squeezed past me on the gantry and climbed back down the ladders. When she was down on the deck she put her hands in her jacket pockets and stamped heel of her boots like she was cold and bored, waiting for me to join her. I just sat there ,wowed by "space".

After a while she called up, "Come on Reese get down here will you. I have something else to show you, we'll take the long way back."

Reluctantly I climbed down. She put her arm though mine and led me away from the light show. I think she wanted to steady me as we crossed the deck. Moving around in low G is like balancing on a trampoline especially when you can't resist looking up and overhead instead of where your feet are .

"So why don't you like space?" I asked

"Ask me that again when you've been out here a few hundred years," she replied.

"The long way back' was through Fitz's collections and storage area . Museum-style cases and shelves in arch-ceilinged rooms, each the size of a Wal-Mart, but instead of wood and glass cases; graphite grey 'metal' and transparent energy fields. They contained collections of bones, clothing, artifacts, and robotics-most in various states of assemblage or brokenness- whichever way you evaluated the entropic state of things.

Towards the back of one of the museum rooms was a store, a mortuary, similar to those you see in hospital and crime dramas; racks of coffin-like drawers with dead people in them, and in this place, presumably other dead or inert "things".

"Have you ever seen a cadaver before?" she asked.

I'd seen a dead body. An old teaching friend of my mom's passed away in his home. He'd suffered a heart attack and we'd found him on the living room carpet. In those circumstances death had seemed not just inevitable but natural.

Fitz reached up and rested her hand on one of the drawer handles but she hesitated-"He's a not mess. Time of death; thirty minutes before I found him. He was in a bunker in New California Sate Desert, 2047, there'd been a hell of shoot-out down there no survivor-gunshots, multiple stab wounds, look like they'd run out of ammo and had hacked each other up with knives. This only a single gunshot though , and it's clean."

I thought about the bunker I'd met Cameron in,too much of a coincidence, "What were you doing down there, in that bunker?" I asked, trying not to let her see or read in my mind or notice how nervous I'd become. _My mind was working overtime, was Cameron something to do with this…had she been involved?-'No survivors'_, was she…dead.

"Down there? Me and probably all the vessels in your local quadrant picked up a series of unshielded TDE signatures from down there. Running unshielded TDE is a seriously bad idea by the way. You're lucky it was me who showed up first there's a few ruthless types out here and your planet is so lightly defended, you don't stand a chance"

"Did they do this?"

"No-this is an internal-to planet conflict, two indigenous ethnic groups hacking each other up."

Fitz rolled out the draw and I stepped over to peer inside. She pulled back the sheet…

… "_Scarface_", his eyes were open . A bullet hole dead center of his forehead.

" 'Scarface?' You know him?" Fitz asked.

"I don't know his name, but that's what I call him, I've only met him once - I think he wanted to kill me."

"Probably did, so beyond briefly running into him, are you're sure you don't know who he is?"

"No I don't , I know nothing about him except meeting him. Cameron wouldn't even talk about it, for security reasons, probably my own."

Fitz sat down on a stool by the side of the 'coffin'. My eyes were drawn to his body. One side of his face was as I remembered it; gristle and burn tissue, out of which his left eye squinted, the other side was normal, he had strong features, he eyes still preserved their emerald ice green but they were now lifeless , or perhaps that's how they'd always been maybe because he'd seen so much death. He wore a three-day white stubble on his chin, and in the stillness of death you could see the intricate perfection in his face's detail . I shivered.

She reached over and nearly touched the dark hole in his forehead, her fingertip hovered over it. "Have you noticed how the entry wound is absolutely on center in the forehead? if you placed a topologically contoured grid from the top of his skull to the top his nose and stretched it across the skull, this entry wound is in the exact center of the center square on that grid. Whoever did this is knew how to handle a firearm."

"Do you know who shot him?" I asked, trying not to bring an image of Cameron to my mind.

Fitz shrugged-"He had lot of enemies even within his own close circle. Right now it could be one of any number of them. He definitely didn't do this to himself."

" Do you know his name?" I asked.

"Yeah…yes I do" She sat back and folded her arms, deliberating-probably weighing up how much I could take in one go. She gestured for me to sit on the stool opposite her on the other side of the mortuary drawer. As we talked over the corpse, our voices ( our exchanged thoughts) became hushed in the way people talking do when they're around the dead. I glanced over the waxy features again, I knew there was a bigger hole at the back of his skull and half his brains would still be down in that bunker.

"His name's General John Connor, he was sixty-one years old ."

" 'General John Connor'," I spoke out loud, I now had the name to fit the face which had haunted my nightmares and waking thoughts ever since I'd returned to LA.

"He has another name, are you ready for this John? –You told me Cameron was his former bodyguard, am I right?"

I swallowed, I guessed if she knew this much she already aware of his and Cameron's previous relationship, "Yes, she was, " I replied.

" Well…he was actually 'President Connor', or at least that what he called himself ."

"Fuck!" that's all could say, I was sitting there with my mouth open ,over his dead body, sucking air, or what passed for it. What the 'fuck' was I into here?

She continued, "In most accounts he's described as a non-democratic military dictator, there's absolutely nothing about the cause of death in any record, only that he was vitrified into a sandstone tunnel system by a nuclear detonation the official story ; Something went wrong and General Connor heroically stayed behind to make sure his staff and troops got out before the bang. I think we can rule that out, don't you? "

The enormity of what I gotten myself sank in- like a bullet in the head, "So he was or will be the President of the United Sates? ,

Fitz shook her head, "Not the USA - Connor claimed to be the President of Earth, undisputedly he would have been the most powerful man on your planet in 2047 before he was killed."

I let out a long slow breath, shut my eyes and rested my forehead in my hands. This was so out of any league I could ever imagine myself in or dealing with. Then it really hit me,"…Is Cameron, dead, I mean does she die, is that where she went back to after she left LA?"

"That robot, the one we fixed got out of there, and I believe three other people did too, all I said was,' everyone in that bunker was dead', do you recall?"

"Cameron, did she get out?"

I heard the draw close and lock, and I felt Fitz's hand my shoulder. .." Come on I have some more stuff to show you"

When we left the mortuary I stumbled after her. All I could visualize in my mind was the entry wound in Connor's forehead and I was thinking about Cameron being in that bunker .It made me feel physically sick.

In the next area, laid out on a workbench was arrangement of bones and robotic parts which were clearly part of the same skeleton frame. The sand-blasted bones were white and the metal components shone, a web of dark carbon nanotube fibre , 'nerves' wound around the organic and metal parts linking them together . Next to the skeleton, the tattered remains of space suit and what had been breathing apparatus.

She'd found it down in the Lyot Crater. He'd been dead nearly three hundred years. The Lyot Crater is one area on Mars where the frozen aquifer is nearest to the surface . That's the positive, the negative –Lacus is tornado county, sand twister alley.

He'd had a small team robots with him, they'd built a shelters and they managed to drill down into the aquifer with some success. She told me they were trying to set up a colony. He was a hybrid of human and machine parts, almost adapted to life on Mars but not quite. Fitz's, theory was he'd been trying to establish a colony because there was far more shelter, rations and fuel cells, than could be accountable to the machine and human bodies she'd found-They were waiting for the arrivals who'd never showed.

Then she came out with it," Here's the weirdest thing, you know what? that's Charles Fischer ."

"My Math teacher, that … Fitz, I'm sorry, this is crazy."

"Logic says it can't be him, but I found his files, they're preserved In that computer system over there ."

She was talking about a sandblasted, dented metal case on the floor next to the skeleton. "According to its memory, in 2008 Charles Fischer began two life sentences for homicide. He'd never been a teacher, he worked for a software company in LA, and on his release he was employed by the Defense Department working on the software for that computer system. It was part of a very early parole deal for him.- That' box ' is an early twenty-first century military supercomputer . Later, it must have been central to the Mars colonization program ,because they went to the trouble of getting it to Mars in its own space drone. According to all the files in that computer he's never even applied to be a math teacher in his life."

"So, that isn't the same Charles Fischer?"

She folded her arms, leaned her shoulder into the wall and studied the half-metal, half-bone skeleton, "Incorrect, I took a contact sample of your Charles Fischer when I was in your classroom, it's the same man

"Twin brother?"

"No exact genetic match, zero variation-not a twin."

"How?"

She shrugged, "That's what you and I are going to find out."

"Us ?"

"Yeah 'us', we're going to have to go down into that bunker and find out."

"Why?"

"Because that's where Fischer originally came from."

I didn't how much she knew back then, she couldn't read my mind, or get into my unconscious memory, she could only 'hear' my surface, cognizant thoughts, and it was consensual. I tried to keep what I knew about Cameron blocked and partitioned off.

Had Cameron done this? I wasn't willing to believe she had, but I loved her and love blinds you.

The last thing I saw in her "museum" totally ripped the shit out of me. We walked down an aisle housing machines that appeared to me like upright walking industrial bulldozers, drones and self-aware robots, mostly designed for operating at massive pressures in liquid methane and nitrogen atmospheres. They looked like they could Godzilla a million-population city. In one of the energy shielded 'cases' was the robot we'd been working on. It was flat-out on a workbench like Fischer's bones and components had been.

When I walked past, the targeting system in its eye sockets fired red, and that thing threw itself off the table faster than a rattler from under a rock. In mid-air it took a swipe at my head, crashed into the energy shield and bounced back against the bench, faster than in the time I could have reacted in a boxing ring. It stood upright with its 'good' hand, palm pressed against the energy wall, glaring at me in tactical wavelength laser red, probably trying to blind me with the beam.

I stood, frozen on the spot, everything crashed ,Scarface, Fischer, Cameron. My hands and arms shook like crack-head's in withdrawal. I have never been so fucking scared and disconnected in all my life.

"Come here, it's alright, she can't get out ."Fitz grabbed hold of me and pulled me into a shoulder- hug. "Sorry, Vyaak will work on her, restore her higher functions ,full memory –all she is now is base production-line instincts and drive."

I sort of mumbled into her neck , she patted my back. "It fucking tried to kill me."

"She tried to kill you because you're the only human here, in this room, on this ship, that's all. John, ,watch:" Fitz let go of me , she gazed at the robot and long-blinked. It compliantly lay back down on the table top as if climbing onto a mattress and the red light in its orbits faded to black. Fitz was a fucking robot-whisperer.

She grabbed my wrists and looked me in the eyes, "I not going to let her hurt you, have you got that John Reese? She's not like that , she's as she was when she was first built. We will restore her and her full memory and all her higher functions."

"I never want to see that thing again. Tell me:What am I into here Commander?"

What she said next ,in a calm voice, totally threw me," I want you to understand this, you don't know it yet, and I don't do favors, but I'm now I'm repaying the one you will do for me."

"What for, what will I do?"

"Something you haven't even imagined doing . Listen to me, now I don't trust you .You don't trust me, so that metal bitch is my collateral- have you got that?"

"You mean, if I screw up you'll send it after me like a demon repo –woman?"

She took my hand and pulled me away from it. "No, no, nothing like that. If you owe me , I'll come after you myself and I promise you you'll know about it."

She quickly changed the subject, probably to try to calm me down, make things "normal" again. I think she'd previously miscalculated my reactions. "Listen John, in the trunk of my Porsche there's some groceries, I bought them downtown LA yesterday afternoon, before I visited you school, shall we find my SUV and you can carry them back for me?"

As we left the area I glanced back over my shoulder, that robot-thing was laid with its head on its side and I swear it was watching a me, all the way, until me and Fitz turned the corner. I was thinking, to myself, "that " was her "collateral", so for what, exactly?


	4. Chapter 4

The nearer it came to the jump the more Fitz became agitated and vacant in her head. She'd become like an addict needing a fix. All her attention was focusing on that point two hours ahead, as if it was the apex and peak moment of her existence. Her hands trembled, her forehead dampened with sweat, she started losing the thread of conversation, pausing at the end of a sentence, trying to remember what she'd been talking about. I was worrying, but I kind of understood what happening. I tried to imagine what she'd told me about how she interfaced with her ship and the pleasure it gave her, so how she was acting was understandable.

I'd walked back with her to our rooms through the labyrinth of corridors and flight of steps carrying four bags of groceries which consisted mainly of high energy junk food .She bustled along, walking so quickly I was almost jogging to keep up. When we were back in my room she spread the contents of the bags over the tabletop. There was about fifteen thousand calories; a heap of chocolate bars, potato chips, chocolate milkshake, and energy drinks, bananas-you get the idea. I did not believe such a small frame could fit so much food inside it, she was sharing, some of it, with me.

She explained the Jump took a huge toll on a pilot's energy and she needed to get this inside her, digest it beforehand. Her whole body, brain and nervous system were working at an accelerated rate, and in the hours before a jump she became ravenous, craving carbohydrate.

I was half-listening to what she was telling me but those images of the hole in Connor's head, Fischer's bones and that insane robot that swung its jagged stump of an arm at my head, rotated around my mind like chambered rounds in a revolver, and perhaps it felt like I was listening to an increasingly disassociated neuro-junkie- alien who was about to leap me thirty years into the future, and I felt as if I was playing Russian Roulette. As nibbled at my pile of junk food I couldn't taste the flavors of anything, only feel the texture in my mouth, thinking maybe this what eating last meal is like.

As Fitz explained it, she would be in a controlled coma for about twelve hours after the jump and out of action for at least a day until she fully recovered. She casually dropped it on me that in the minutes leading up to the jump and for an hour or so afterwards I'd be unconscious too. The Jump required her breaking contact with me pretty soon. She told me she'd done it a thousand times and I'd be fine, and for me it'd be just like closing my eyes and taking an afternoon siesta.

I saw my face reflected in her dark glasses, the droplets of sweat breaking out on forehead. "How will I know when it's time to Jump?" I asked.

She was becoming more agitated and her voice was shaky, "I'm sending a 'bot in to sit with you, It'll make sure you're tucked in, and it'll check you whilst you're under." She broke another piece of chocolate off the slab and shoved it into her mouth. She stood up and touched my shoulder, "don't worry, I'll see you on the flip-side, it'll be 2047 when you wake up."

With left Fitz the room, I listened to the patter of her boots as she walked fast along the corridor, like a girl stealing across the dorm to her boyfriend's room after midnight.

I close my door, lay on my cot, and stared at a point on the ceiling where the light reflected on its dull surface, it seemed a little less gray than the rest. I tried to concentrate on it stop the images flowing in and out of my head.

After a while I heard a light rapping on my door. It was the "'bot". The moment I placed my hand on the door handle I weirdest sense of premonition, it was like I knew what was on the other side of that door before I opened it. Or maybe that's how your brain works under this kind of stress a way of retrospectively making sense after an event.

All my brain processed was the two red dots and the skeletal metal chassis. It wore a combat jacket covering its arms and upper torso, in its hand it held a bag, which my overloaded cognition morphed into something like a severed head dangling in a dripping sack.

Reflexes kicked in, I threw myself back across the room knocking over the table, scattering wraps and junk food cartons. I stood back-against the wall telling myself_ keep out corners, look for gaps, keep on your feet, get ready to move. _My whole body was ramped and wired like a pair of grasshopper's legs.

The thing in my doorway didn't move. I yelled, "Fitz!" There was no answer, only the silence of the closed mental connection between us.

I scrabbled for options: _Dodge past it, sprint like hell at that wall at the end of the corridor ,maybe if charged at it hard enough I'd pass though,…lose it in the labyrinth… lure into an airlock, blow the fucking thing out of it…did this ship have airlocks?_

It didn't advance it just stood there its gaze downcast to the floor holding …my IPad case and my schoolbag. I'd left them in the foot well of Fitz's SUV. The color its eyes had taken on a light sapphire blue glow. Its missing arm and wrist had been replaced. I knew it was the same 'bot'; there was a skid-mark in the metal, near the round port in the side of the dome of its skull.

It raised its head and turned its sapphire-blue eyes to me .It spoke in neutral and androgynous voice," I came to apologize," it said.

Even if its contrition was genuine and the thing had been repaired, I wanted it as far away from me as possible. I managed not to squeak out, "What the fuck do you want?"

It resumed looking at the floor presumably waiting for me to tell it I'd accepted its apology

."I'm apologizing here", Reese, it said with more than a little more firmness in its voice, like it didn't normally "do" apologizing.

I didn't, or rather couldn't answer. I was thinking _come on, three steps in and I'm around you, you metal bastard._

It must have read my intent because it glanced up from the floor again and gazed straight at me. It spoke softly and reasonably," I have been repaired. I now have higher and social functions, I'm self-aware and some of my memory has been restored. I didn't mean to startle you in the Collections Rooms, what you experienced was my basic impulse. I'm very sorry and I won't try to harm you again."

It held my schoolbag and pad at arm's length in front of it, "Commander Fitzgerald requested I monitored you during the Jump and I'm not apologizing again. May I come in now, please?"

I was still on "Plan A": find exit route, dodge robot, run.

" No! You can just fucking stay right there!" I shouted at it.

The tone of its voice became firm and indignant, "Look, I said I'm sorry alright. Hey, will you look at this mess you've made here." It gestured to upturned table, the wraps, packaging , packets and bags of snacks, cartons and bottles I'd scattered all over the floor.

The machine continued," That was a result of your reflexes wasn't it? - We both have reflexes we can't control when our minds aren't fully functional. Mine is functional now. I brought you your things." It offered them to me again.

I just stared at my schoolbag dangling on the end of its arm, those metal fingers wrapped around the straps.

"Reese " …" it almost snapped at me ,and it sounded like it was losing patience, "If I wanted to kill you, you'd already be dead, so stop being so goddamn awkward will you, please, this ship's going to jump in two hours so, let me get on with my job."

"You're really not going try to kill me again?"

"No! And… I don't '_try'_ to kill." It sounded like I'd insulted it. With a very human gesture it put it hands on its hips and let out a long digital sigh. It gently tapped its foot on the floor waiting for me to respond. "You need to call your mom, its eight PM relative time back on earth, and she'll be going out of head in about an hour when you don't show up. The ship will set up an FTL link for the call."

Another type of cold fear spread through my body, one of realization, it knew about my family." How do you know about my mom?"

The machine pointed at a flash on the side of its shoulder. It depicted a double DNA helix and skull of a machine similar to itself. "This is Section Seven uniform. If found it in the Collections Room I was stored in. Section Seven is a joint machine-human combat, monitoring and reconnaissance unit. Colonel Phillips is the Section's current executive officer. I often speak with her and I have spoken with her on her return from LA. That's how I know about you and your family."

It now had all my attention "Is Cameron alive?"

"When you are in an time- distortion vessel like this, everything in the universe that will live or has ever lived is in a state of potentially, either it's unborn, it's alive or it's dead at any given set of space-time coördinates and possible timelines."

I assumed it was being pedantic. I swallowed, because my mouth was dirt-dry, "so Cameron is alive?"

I swear it looked at me like I was dumb, "_Yes_," it said with an exasperated tone edging into its voice "…now may I come in please?"

What choice did I have?

With smooth feline steps it padded across the floor. Its hips swung like a woman's. It picked the table up in front of me, set it right, and bent over to pick up the things I'd tipped on the floor –its movements were deft, supple and balletic.

"Are you going to help me here?" It said.

I took a deep breath and knelt, keeping as far away from it as I could and picked anything near to me.

When we'd put the trash in empty bags and everything back on the table it sat down in the chair where Fitz had sat, and with a feminine movement it crossed its legs and arranged the bottom of the combat jacket over the top of its thighs to cover them like it was pulling down the hem of a skirt. Its feet, like it's hands, were metal claws.

The idea of a' 'robot' wanting to keep its "modesty" seemed almost ludicrous to me… at first. Them my brain started working, thinking: It had served with Cameron and Del, it was imitating their movements, behavior and gestures, probably to try put me at ease.

"Please, will you sit down," it said. It gave me the impression I was starting to piss it off, or at least make it "feel" uncomfortable , like I was the one acting weird around here.

It more or less interrogated me about if I'd been seeing anyone else after Cameron had left LA. It wanted to know if there was anyone I might be staying in LA, who my mom wouldn't call up and double-check where I was. I told it about Kat, the girl from the chess club, with whom I spent a night a couple of months before I met Cameron. Kat didn't go to my college and mom and my foster family didn't have her number, I'd kept it to myself. Kat's family weren't in the LA directory.

I called up my mom from the edge of the solar system and told her I was staying over at Kat's. Mom sounded delighted that I found another girl, so I deliberately added, I wasn't sleeping in her room and we were only playing chess. I'd be back around eight in the morning. How would I get back? - I'd jog back,, I needed the exercise, so there was no need for her to drive over to Kat's and pick me up.

As I'd been making the call the machine examined the tips of its fingers on its new hand, like a woman with polish drying on her nails. When I finished the call it carried on fanning its new finger ends and let out another digital sigh. "So, do you actually prefer this 'Kat' to Colonel Phillips? " It asked.

"No," I said, and I meant it.

"That's alright then," the machine replied. It appeared to contemplate something for a while then it brought its hands together and rested its elbows on the table top, "It seems we have a mutual problem Reese."

"And that is?"

"You want to get back to your life-partner, and I need to return to my unit. "

"My life-partner?" Maybe that was a term machines used for human relationships.

"Yeah your 'life –partner', and, you know what? I have just spent near enough the last three hundred years in low-energy hibernation getting my ribs sandblasted on the surface of Mars, fun-_not_." It gave me a harsh glance "… but don't mention it Reese." It ran its hand over the bullet 'scar' on the side of its skull, like a girl suddenly embarrassed by an acne rash or a blemish. I'd been staring at it, and I hadn't been aware.

"How you did I get that?" I asked

"Some bonehead with an anti-tank tried to my head off."

"Bonehead?"

She, (I'd begun to make more sense of it as a "she"-bot), reached forward and gently rapped my forehead with a metal knuckle. "'Bonehead', and you're staring at me," she said quietly. She put her finger under my jaw, "You could close your mouth unless you're talking as well, please."

"What do I call you?" I asked.

"715, catchy isn't it?"

'_Not'_

I questioned 715 about why Fitz was involved here .715 said she didn't know , but suspected there was something very valuable in the bunker that Fitz wanted.

It had not occurred to me, Fitz was a pilot, and now at this moment she possessed very little sense of strategic planning. 715 explained that Fitz didn't actually have a coherent strategy for getting in and out of that bunker. That's why Fitz put 715 on it -715 had specialist knowledge and detailed files about the bunker systems and the troops down there. Fitz had left it to us to come up with a valid entry and exit strategy. She was also out of it for at least twenty-four hours after the jump, and that only gave us less than two days to prepare.

Fitz had granted 715 access to her collections, basically she'd given us pass to walk through the walls. Rather than sitting around waiting for me to black out when we jumped, 715 suggested we go back into the Collections Rooms and do a quick recon ., for any equipment that might help us when we were down on the ground. That made sense. "Do mind if go red-eye now? I scan better in red wavelength." 715 said.

When we stepped through the corridor wall we were back in the long hallway .715 tugged my arm," Low G,this is amazing, I absolutely h,ve to try this do you mind?"

She did the perfect cartwheel; it flowed in slow-motion as if she was drawing a slow circle with her fingers and toes. "Fucking wow! When I get back I got to build myself one of these", She opened her"jaw" and displayed her metal teeth like she was smiling.

I think it was the strain of the last few hours, but I just stood there and laughed ,I didn't know what else to do- What I thought at the time: 715 was a programmed but self-aware machine and it was doing its best to come over as a little crazy but in friendly eccentric way. It reminded me of mix of Cameron and Del, which of course I assumed it to be imitating .After about half an hour I'd stopped feeling threatened by 715 and whatever psychological processes were at work gave me the illusion she was at least a human-like being and I reasoned this was how machines interacted with humans in Section Seven.

715 led me back through the labyrinth of passageways and past the empty case where she'd been held in an energy field before she'd been repaired and released. When we'd made a turn, and not speaking she brushed her metal fingers over my wrist and the back of my hand, and she tugged on my hand. I tried not to flinch and let her do it. At times she walked next to me with her hands in her pockets, other times, in front and everything about her composure and movement was human-like but expressed as if in an effortless contemporary dance. I found myself just watching her move, for the sake of watching, it was like she was imitating Cameron but trying to go one better in low G.

715 had a theory: everything in Fitz's collection was of earth-human origin. I'd assumed it was mostly alien but 715 disagreed. It was laid out as a history of our technological development , and she could comprehend the progression and evolution of the technology, which as far as she knew, started in that bunker with Connor, Fischer's bones, herself, and the black box, that military computer which told me was called Skynet. For that time on the human race appeared to spread out into space. At some point, maybe three hundred years on from the time of Connor it all ended abruptly –there was nothing else, no decline and fall. She went on to explain nature of the technology which she could find appeared overwhelmingly military– the only thing that wasn't part of that development was the ship we were on, as far she could tell it was alien and so far different and advanced from us she didn't have a clue how it worked.

I asked why she thought the epoch of our history Fitz had simply run out collection room?

715 didn't think so, and said she wasn't sure what had happened.

The area we were in was early period, Connor's time. 715 ran hand over tubular frame with, carbon fiber harnesses, legs and arms similar to hers driven by electric motors – It was a Special Forces "Terrain Walker" which allowed a human to strap itself in and keep up with the machines so we could carry similar loads in deserts, or in other strenuous logistics situations .715 pointed to her chest; it used the same fuel cell that powered her.

"Look at this!" She picked up a combat knife off the shelf, "This could be mine".

She examined the handle and blade, and eventually decided it wasn't. As she held the knife, hairs on the back of my neck rose up like they become staticized, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a two-dimensional shadow slope off a case and sweep across the floor towards us.

715 put the knife back on the shelf,"Reese, what's up?"

"Nothing, I'm over-tired." I replied.

She walked along the shelves and picked up a boxy-looking rifle with a snub-nosed muzzle and she searched around for a working fuel cell. When she found one, a red diode lit up and the weapon gave out a "weeeeeeeee" as it charged up. 715 explained to me about the weapon, "'Out there', this is a soldier's best friend."- It was Mk 6 Phase rifle, robust and durable, and from a low charged cell like the one she'd slapped into it, it normally took much less time takes less than the two minutes to charge. She pressed the stock into her cheek sighted it around the cabinets.

I saw the Shadow move again. This time, a three-dimensional ,human-like area of darkness stepped out of a wall. I didn't see it move again until it was three feet away from 715, bang in front of her face. She was standing with her back to me, and it started flowing around her like smoke.

I whispered," I think you need to put that rifle back on the shelf, like now."

"Why?"

"Can't you fucking see it?"

"See 'fucking' what?" There's nothing moving in here except us."

The charging tone of the rifle whined higher. It had maybe sixty seconds complete its cycle. The shadow opened up around her. Now it was like a black shroud, spangled with stars; the quick way out of this ship and out through the hull into space.

I glanced over my shoulder, "there's two more of them behind us, they're like fucking shadows and they're coming out of the walls ".

715 the raised the rifle and tried to spin around to cover behind us. It happened so fast I saw a flash - In her mid-turn the combat knife flew from the shelf, It hit her handle-first, clanged off the side of her skull and clattered across the floor maybe twenty yards behind us.

The next thing I knew she grabbed hold of my arm, and yelled "Jump!" Before I realized what had happened I was about eight feet up the side of the cabinet , I grabbed hold of the edge of the top and I pulled myself up. She was already on the top and on her feet, sweeping up and down the walkway under us with the plasma rifle "Where the fuck are they Reese… babe talk to me where fuck are they?-Give me eyes on them."

"They" were all around us on the tops of cabinets, on the ground, swooping out of patches of darkness in the walls and floors.

715 was about to randomly fire the first shot – They all moved again in unison . Now they completely encircled us.

I took biggest gamble of my life so far.I shouted," Drop the weapon –do it!"

She didn't so I pushed the top of the rifle down with the flat of my hand –"Drop it!"-This time she complied. I grabbed hold of her and pulled her tight against me. I flung my arms around her back, and pulled her toward me so the side of the face of her skull pressed into my chest, "Shut you 'eyes', stand still don't even look at them," I told her . Maybe she could hear my heart pounding like it was going to burst, because if I'd got this wrong we were both about to be annihilated.

The shadows stood around us like frozen darkness, "Don't hurt her, she doesn't understand, she only thought she was protecting me."

I felt 715's fingers gripping the fabric my shirt at the back," What the hell are you talking about Reese?" she whispered into my ear

"Trust me, stay dead still, don't move, and don't speak again."

The shadows hadn't moved. "She didn't mean it, it was a reflex –do you understand? "If you leave her alone I'll switch this weapon off, do we have a deal? Don't harm her."

I let go of her for a few seconds, bent down and flicked the switch. The red light faded and became silent. I stood up and grabbed 715 again and held her.

When the red charging light went out the shadows vanished as if someone had turned on a spotlight light on them, that's when my whole body started trembling. 715 had to hold me with her arms around my back to steady me.

After a while, I was the first to let go and I sat on the edge of the cabinet. "Don't even try to pick the rifle up-turn it off-leave it there," I said to her.

She sat down next to me "What just happened? I couldn't sense anything,"

"Come here", I put my arm around her waist if they still watching. She leaned into me like human female.

From up there I could see clear over and into tops of the cases. There were probably miles of broken machines, most of which had sustained damage in combat. Now, this was just a working theory, but I told 715 by Fitz was a "destroyer" and an "interceptor". Its purpose as I saw it was in its name: Any species that comes out here with guns blazing is sooner or later going to get wiped out of the galaxy…by one of these ships. Whoever built intended it to move though time and gather evidence, and Fitz, who describes herself a forensic archaeologist, was building a case for or against a hostile aggressive species and the outcome was based on her research and judgment. I believed this ship ran on mostly automated responses Fitz was the "spark plug" of its consciousness, and its conscience. It was built to investigate and respond to acts of interstellar warfare.

"Like those' shadows'? " 715 asked.

"Yeah like them."

"You worked all that out under pressure?" 715 kept her the side of her cheek pressed against my chest.

"Yeah I did, but I was going on a lot of stuff that Fitz had previously hinted at."

"That's was pretty fucking cool, I owe you one Reese ".She gave me a light slap on the chest and we let go of each other.

"No more picking up and waving weapons around here."

"No more picking up any weapons", she agreed.

We both hung by our fingers over the edge and dropped to the floor .When she stood up she put her hand to her head. I saw it as it trembled. She'd lost the grace, the confidence that expressed itself in her movement." I've only been online again about an hour, and I've nearly got you killed. I'm so stupid."

"It's alright, you weren't to know."

"No it's not fucking alright Reese; I've never been up against anything my sensors can't detect." 715 seemed as if her feet were fixed to the floor. She was in shock, and she was afraid..

"Well, we got though it didn't we, we're both alive," I said. "You know the way back, we're going to jump in an hour, and I need to be back in my room, remember? Take my hand ". She curled her fingers gently and firmly around mine, "Come show me the way." I said, as if talking to human in the same state.

When we approached the combat knife on the floor, I said, "Don't even think about picking it up."

"I wasn't going to. Will you put your arm around me again?"

I put my arm around her steered her past that blade on the floor. I left my arm around her waist, reasoning it sent the right message to whatever was observing us. Furthermore, emulated or not ,to a self-aware machine I guessed that experience and her responses to it must have coalesced into whatever she experienced as consciousness, and to her must seemed pretty scary and very real, as real as anything was to me.

Bottom line:I needed 715 intact, functional, "alive"- I was prepared to play buddy to a robot that thought it was nearly human. Whatever it took to get Cameron safely out of that bunker,and 715 had all the data I needed, hadn't she.

It was all that simple really, wasn't it?


	5. Chapter 5

_Is there a template of this ship?_

Yes there is. Spinrad's ,"The void Captains Tale" is the where idea for Fitz came from, although she is very different to the pilot in his story as is his ship. I'm not sure about the ship itself, but it will be a mix of Sc-Fi ships, probably the TARDIS is one example.

_Will Fitz be the judge of humanity?_

I think that's probably down to a member of the human to exmine at our history and future of its own race and decide,or maybe come up with an alternative.

_Is there a grim outcome for the human race?_

Potentially,very grim.

_Will I join up the end of Starcrossed with this story?_

No, that was me messing about on my FF scratch pad, and it doesn't belong at the end of there anyway.

_Will John be ticked when he discovers 715 is Cameron?_

If she is, I presume he will, or perhaps not, because by the end of this chapter maybe he already knows at a subconscious level?

_Is it worth me reading this chapter?_

I don't know, it's dark and a bit gritty, and there's no AI's or aliens with ethereal voices sublimely explaining everything to us dumb humans in it,so maybe you will.

* * *

><p>When Fitz and I had walked back through the long walkway from the museum to our rooms her concentration was breaking up. I had only been half listening to what she had said anyway. Now I was walking with 715 on the same route I recalled Fitz warning me that during the last few minutes before the jump her ship would be operating on full power and in the moments before "black-out" I would experience some "issues" with reality. There would be a small time; maybe thirty seconds or so in which I would experience visions and hallucinations before I went under.<p>

Fitz said I was not to worry about these perceptual disturbances , they were normal and there were members of some species who deliberately used the Jump to gain self- knowledge ,the way she described it, for them was like bungee jumping off a cliff except leaping through space-time was incredibly more intense, a way of literally touching the void with you mind. I wasn't sure if this applied to 715 but if she was self-aware-I saw no reason it should not, and that worried me.

I clung on to one premise. A visiting professor of cognitive science had given a guest lecture at Esperanza. He told us a baseline for measuring reality:

"How do you know if anything is real?" He asked.

His answer cut through all philosophical knots and paradoxes, his answer was simple; reality or at least it's a priori nature if has one, is not a measurable thing in itself but it has measurable consequences and effects, hence to quote a famous American sociologist, "situations defined as real are in real in their consequences". That phrase had stuck in my mind.

As we entered the long corridor, the one that led back to my room, it was clear things had been moved around, as was the custom of this ship. There were new display cases in the distance near the exit to our rooms that weren't there when 715 and myself had gone into Fitz's labyrinth.

715 was already as jumpy as hell, and she only spoke in brief forced whispers. It became worse when she saw the new cases. I believed if a pin had dropped she'd have clung to the ceiling by her metal claws."Socks, take your sneakers off and give me your socks," she said.

I did what she asked and she pulled my socks over her metal feet. I didn't really think increasing the sound insulation between her and the floor would make much practical difference, but doing something, anything tactical placated her. I couldn't hear 715's movement anyway. She was soundless, at least to my ears, and as she padded next to me she brushed her hips and body against me like a big cat, one let out of a cage, prowling and radiating suppressed violence. Her whole being needled from being outmatched in a fight and she was trying to figure out how to kill the shadows, gunning for another go at them.

I kept my arm around her waist because I'd noticed physical contact seemed to keep her calm. I was thinking about what the shadows, and I'd definitely decided to hold back on telling her about Connor's body down in the mortuary, I knew in her state of raised alert that news would push her over the edge.715 was on a micro-switch fuse.

She pressed her face into the side of my neck when she spoke, "you know the one thing that pisses her off about you?" She was talking about Cameron, or rather Colonel Phillips. " You, philosophizing when you should be paying attention to your surroundings and trying figure out how to defend ourselves, at times you're like an fucking airhead."

"She told you that?"

She hissed through metal teeth, "Uh huh she did, so concentrate."

She pulled my arm tighter around the small of her back .I spread my palm and fingers across her abdomen. I carried my sneakers in my free hand, acutely aware of the sound of my bare feet on the floor and the rustle of my clothes. Walking without making any noise became harder the more I tried to do it. I was so clumsy at the side of her.

This close I became aware of the burning stench of war infused into her combat jacket. It was the same smell of Cameron when I first met her. 715 was imitating Cameron's lightness of being, her behavior and her movement. I looked away, and apart from the hard but warm metal of her abdomen under my hand, I allowed myself brief indulgences of the illusion this was Cameron at my side. Why not ?- In less than an hour I was going to be jumped into the future by a neuro-junkie pilot and we and this vast ship might all end up as particles, matter-energy spread in a slick across thirty years of the space-time continuum.

I felt 715's 'nails' dig into my wrist to bring me back into here and now-I had done it again, lost concentration and 715 was whispering to me," I've analyzed the data a of load of times ,the only tangibles are temperature and gravity variation, were taking a tenth of a degree centigrade and there's a small decrease in gravity, less than zero-point-one graviton …you said there were two of them behind us ; the variance doubles , when they were all around us, it's an increased constant".

She wasn't letting anything drop, she was still on a;" if it exists I can kill it," trip. I didn't believe these things were kill-able but her pride was dented so much she needed to talk it out of her system, like boxers must when they are coming down after a fight - when they lose you listen and talk them down, for very rarely are we ever convinced by the outcome.

We nearly made it back to my room without incident but my heart sank when I saw what was in the unshielded open cases which had appeared end of the long corridor. She pulled up in front of them and with me holding her around the waist, almost restraining her , she said," oh my fucking god", and she was like a woman standing in front of a store, its window full of cut diamonds. There were weapons, some of which she told me she didn't even know the names of.

She tried to take a step forward, I stopped her. "Don't touch anything, walk on by."

"What! Are you out of your mind?" Her face was inches from mine, her red optics dimmed so as not to damage my eyes, and I stared her down. From somewhere I found a confidence I'd never realized I possessed, "you think you can fight those things… you think you can fight this?" I waved my free hand and sneakers, gesturing at the ship we were in "…no way- isn't it obvious this is a test? So you, you leave any weapons of mass destruction exactly where they are and you walk back my room with me, now!"

–I held my breath, she seemed to process what I said for about five seconds, then she gave a digital snort of derision, her voice became formal and scathing with sarcasm, " Alright 'General' Reese, your call, I will escort you back to your 'quarters. now."

She deliberately walked beside me quickly and with so much grace and control she made me feel even more of a clumsy oaf flapping along bare-foot beside her, and her completely ignoring me. I was playing hardball with a female war machine that was trying to crush me like shit to get me to reverse my decision ,but those shadows; I knew they were the quick road out of here into the approximately minus 270 Celsius void outside the hull, for both of us, so I stuck to my guns and put up with the silent treatment. Growing up with two foster sisters was a definite advantage here.

Back in my room 715 pointed at the bed, she'd decided this situation was her domain and she was in charge of it. I let her take charge.

"Come on, get in, I'll sit here and watch you. " She was talking about me and my bed and her seat by the table.

As I made to get on the bed, she said, " Wait !" and she dropped on all fours, stalked across the floor and peered under it,

"What are doing?" I asked.

"Checking."

"Why?"

"Habit of mine." She sat up and brushed her hand over her arm, and I could tell she was becoming stressed , nervous and jittery.

I lay flat on my back on the bed and tried get comfortable. I found the pool of reflected light and stared into it trying to imagine benign light-beings coming out of it, instead things made of dark matter .

When 715 sat down in the chair, she shifted position, obviously feeling uncomfortable, she ran her fingers over the chair legs probably testing the fundamental reality of them, constantly glancing around the room and behind her.

I was getting wired,"715… Sev... will you relax, please".

I went back to staring at the ceiling and she managed about thirty seconds of sitting still when I heard her voice , it had become a rapid-fire whisper again, "what are you staring at?" she asked warily.

I showed her the patch on the ceiling," it's alright, there's nothing, only light. A 'habit of mine', I stare at ceilings." After I spoke the lights flickered, and we heard the deep distant roar of the engines as the ship began powering up.

I tried to stay calm, set an example, still my breathing to a regular flow and focus on the light. It was like I could feel her getting more and more agitated by the second, "so how come you're not going to black out?" I asked.

"I am," she said, I'll check you as long as I can and hopefully I'll be around when you wake up. I don't know how I'm going out for long for though."

She sounded scared, like a kid on her in dark room trying to be brave. Maybe she was playing me, but I thought about her regaining consciousness before I did, in a chair, on her own this place with head-full of demons as well as a tantalizing hoard of-tech armory less than a hundred yards on the other side of the corridor wall.

She made a gesture as if she was sweeping a bang of hair out of eyes," It's alright, I'll lie down on the floor if it bothers you, anyway it's not as if falling over's going to damage me."

I thought it through again;what if, during the build up to the jump the "abnormal brain-mind activity" Fitz had spoken about affected 715? If it did it would probably send her nuts, and there was certainly enough firepower down that corridor to turn this part of the ship into an area reminiscent of the settlers' last stand in the movie Aliens 2, before the shadows ejected 715 and my comatose body out through the hull.

The bed was easily wide enough for two, I made decision; I shoved up and pulled one of the pillows out from under my head-"Here." I pointed to the space next to me.

"What?"

"Lie down next to me."

She sounded genuinely shocked," No way, I'm not getting anywhere near a bed with my CO's life-partner."

"Onto and 'into a bed', there's a difference. Come on get on it-if Cameron asks I'll explain , she won't get mad at you, if she gets mad anyone about anything it'll be me. I swear, I'm not going drop you in it, if that's what you're worrying about."

715 weighed up my proposition and cautiously perched on edge of the bed with her back to me , then she lay down as if she was a human reclining into bath of cold water, as far away as she could, right on the edge of the bed. She drew her legs together, pulled her combat jacket down to her knees and folded her arms over her chest. She lay there stiff as ingot of steel and scanned for the patch of light on the ceiling. She raised an arm and pointed the light," Is that it?" She asked.

"Yep."

"Is that all it does?"

"Yep, and all you have to do stay quiet and try not think of anything, it's really that simple."

She did try to be quiet for about a minute, then she turned her head to me, whispered almost straight into my ear "So, is this like one of those Bonehead ideas, like 'what's the sound one hand clapping?' because if it is, I'm now thinking very hard about not thinking about me scanning this area of unremarkable electromagnetic radiation on your ceiling, is that how works for you?

"Not exactly."

She sighed, irritably. The lights flickered again and stayed out for about five seconds. She tensed up. I decided to try to "talk her "calm, "Tell me what it is like 2047?" I asked

"You wouldn't want to live there," she replied bluntly.

"Come on I want to know what it's like."

She came out with a standard line that I'd heard from Cameron when I'd been pestering her about what is was like where I thought she came from, " in Section Seven anyone remotely involved in your case will have been briefed by Colonel Phillips that if we come into contact with we do not discuss "out there", i.e. what you are now aware of is 2047 . …anyway wait, you'll see it for yourself when we're in earth orbit."

"I bet it's it amazing isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah I assure you you'll be amazed,"- she replied, darkly.

"Well I can't wait, but what about Cameron, Hitch and Del, are they …?"

She snorted out digital laugh "Reese, come on, I mean; two weeks booze and sun in LA ,credit to all of you, you really screwed the boss over."

Like I explained, I was holding back about her" boss" ,President Connor being terminally… dead.

The lights flickered and now there was more darkness than intermittent light. Mentally 715 was a tin cat on hot metal roof. She gripped the bed with her hands and her claw-feet, any harder and the fabric would have ripped open.

"It's alright –come here-rest your head here," I said. I patted my chest.

She looked like I'd ask her to stand down the end of a weapons testing range. "And Going tell her I did this?"

"Maybe, if we survive the jump and you stay calm and right here until I wake up-I swear she won't mind."

There must have been more than a note a note of desperation in my voice, and to tell the truth, I was shit scared of the jump, of the junkie pilot, of dark-matter "shadows", of being in a hi-tech armory and morgue with the body of the former President of Earth, and of lying in a bed with a homicidal Special Forces robot which acted like pissed off version of my girlfriend and Del.

715 must have picked up on it. She rested her head under my chin and stroked my forearm like Cameron did. I could see the reflection of my face in the dome of her skull distorted like it was back of a spoon.

"Why does everyone in Section Seven do that arm-stroke thing?" I asked

"It's just body language when humans are around machines, means I'm Okay you're Okay ,plus, with me I'm walking MRI and loads more. If Iwalked medical ward ,I'd have like ten degrees a bunch diplomas already, these hand can hands do complex surgery, neuro, cardio vascular ,et cetera… I even cut toe-nails in exceptional circumstances…. Swiss Army knife' babe'."

"So why don't you?"

She propped herself up on her elbow as if I'd asked most stupid thing ever, she managed to make me imagine she was frowning at me," because there's absolutely nothing wrong with you."

" I meant, why don't you work in a hospital ?"

"Yeah right, me work in a hospital? Nice sentiment though, thanks…mind if I lie down again?

She nestled back down and rested her hand under her chin . One of her feet pressed against my leg and gently scraped down it as she got comfortable. Maybe she was deliberately screwing with me but I thought about those metal raptor talons ripping more than a couple of layers of flesh off me if she was startled again. I stoked the top of her skull I kept my brushing regular rather, like I was humoring a domesticated panther which had sprawled on top of me and demanded grooming.

"So what is with you?" I asked.

"What do mean? "

"Well, actually, I'm wondering, now don't take this the wrong way, but did you start life start life as human being?"

There was a grumbling whisper halfway down my chest "How the fuck would that work?"

"Upload human soldier's mind, download it into one of these." I emphasized my stroke to the top of her skull.

"What! Why would you even ask that?"

"Because as far as I can see you're better at playing a human role than most human beings I know."

She deliberately and painfully shifted position on my chest. "You read and watch too much Science Fiction. And I can read you better if you do this". She grabbed hold of my hand and made me stroke her wrist.

"But, I'm right, it's true isn't it?"

"Hey, you wouldn't have guessed but I'm older than Colonel Phillips, that's a long time for me to come to terms with what I am and what I'm not. Even if what you said was true, it's not the kind of thing I'd talk about it. I have life 'in spite of', got that Reese?"

"I'm sorry."

"No need , you're not the first to ask. Just forget it now huh."

We lay in silence, her body fitted comfortably against mine and I realized her 'ear' right over my heart and I became aware of it beating under her. I slowed my breathing and tried to calm my heart-rate, hoping it would help her relax.

"You miss her don't you?" she asked.

" Cameron? Yes-like nothing else," and, that was the absolute truth.

"She misses you, and if we don't make the jump, this is from her," she ran fingers down my cheek and I imagined voice was hers, I inhaled the "burning metal" scent of Cameron that never seemed to completely wash out her pores and skin. I gave 715 a hug and we lay still.

The lights went out, in depths of the ship the engines roared, a series of deep bangs reverberated through the hull and shook the bed. The room jolted. Then the lights stayed out.

When I regained consciousness, I had no sense of time passing. 715 were still out of it curled against me where she had been when we blacked out. I felt like I'd something terribly, unforgivably wrong but at first, like dream or a nightmare I couldn't remember what it was. I realized the crotch of my pants was soaking wet, and I very carefully lifted 715 off me and lay her on her on her side in what I assumed would be a comfortable position, but she was like dead body and just flopped like a dead weight and lay there inert as cold steel ingot.

I hadn't pissed myself. During the blackout I had been vividly dreaming; a dream in which my mind confused 715 with Cameron. It was so intense and lucid. It was 715, she had her legs around my back, she'd pulled me into her and it felt like Cameron .One of her nails dug in the small of my back, the tip of a blade, she put pressure on it for me to keep the rhythm. Towards the end we were fucking like a train and I couldn't stop. When I came I felt I was inside Cameron and I heard the sounds Cameron made when she came and her voice.

My mouth went dry I hoped to god in those last moments of half-consciousness I hadn't mounted 715 and humped her like dog on human leg –that was both a total violation of everything I felt about women and a betrayal of Cameron-this was so bad, I have never felt like I'd soiled and done something so despicable another person in all my life. That was real woman inside that metal frame and she would be as mad as hell when she woke up, I would be.

I got up, took my pants off and cleaned myself up The pants I'd arrived in were on the floor next to the sink. I started pulling them on when I heard 715's voice behind me.

"What are you doing?" she asked, the tone was blunt and accusatory.

There was no point in lying; she was, as she told me, a walking body scanner. I didn't dare turn around when I spoke, I couldn't bear to her to look at me. " I had an accident, I ejaculated, it was the blackout field, 715 I swear I don't know if I have, but if I did, I didn't mean touch you - and if I did I am so fucking sorry."

I waited for something like my sneakers to hit me hard on the back of my head but she didn't say or do anything. When I finally turned around she was sitting up in the bed examining the mattress and her legs.

"I'd know if you had touched me," she replied in the kind of voice that I imagined she used before she killed people.

"Well did I?"

"That's for me to know Reese, and it's one those things you don't need to talk about now."

She was seriously mad at me, I could tell. I picked one of the water bottles off the table and took a few gulps. I was unforgiven, but for now I tried to change the subject, "So did you experience anything during the black-out?"

"Yes I did , why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

In the most human way possible she got up and washed her hands for a long time at the sink and ignored me. Standing next to her I felt like condemned man in a cell-she had that Don't, because I am fluent in torture," way about her.

After a while she shook the water off her hands and dried them on a towel.

"It's alright Reese, I concluded a long time ago all human beings are animals, you couldn't help it." There was also a slight tone of pride in her voice, that she'd deceived me enough to believe I was with Cameron, " look, I'll put you out of your misery, you didn't really touch me… much ,you just lay on your back and went into spasm –your brain activity was off the normal scale, but I'm still cross with you."

"About what?" I managed to reply

"About Connor, when I was 'out' I 'saw' him. I don't like the bastard but he's dead, he's on this ship isn't he?"

"Yes he is."

715 glared at me and tilted her head, "You still haven't a clue about anything, do you Reese?"

I just stared at her, "Do you know who killed him?" I asked after a while

She shook her head in disbelief at my attitude and my innocence, "This is what we're going to do: you and I are going to figure out how to get you and that skinny bitch alien down into that bunker and we are going resolve this fucking mess, _right_. "

"And stop President Connor being assassinated?" I asked.

"Whatever, Reese, whatever," 715 replied , she ran her hand over her forehead and let out a long exasperated sigh.

She pulled my note pad out of my school bag and took my pen, tore out pages and laid them over the table top. She sat down and drew maps of the tunnel systems. I picked up enough courage to stand next to her and watch over her shoulder. I felt her free hand brush over my forearm, maybe only to get and keep my full attention. She was frosty but we were 'talking again'.

.

She pointed to her diagram of a tunnel section, "This is where you go in", she said.


	6. Chapter 6

"I will fear..."

715 stayed frosty and formal. She acted how I imagined an officer to behave towards a junior rank ,prompting and demanding that I committed everything to memory,questioning to make sure I'd rendered it down to key points, the simplest form of information storage, for a " fucking Bonehead" like me, apparently.

She'd taken the pen from my writing case, one of the leaving presents Cameron gave me before she shipped out. I know it sounds lame but I carried it around in my school bag and I didn't open it because just having it gave me a feeling of connection with her.

715 examined the case." You haven't used it. I think it was a gift, don't you like it?"

"How do you know?"

"Well let's deduce; forensically, there's traces of Colonel Phillips' DNA on it, and there's this," she handed me a folded note. It had been pushed down the inside of the case– "you haven't even opened it have you?"

It was Cameron's hand writing, I couldn't help smiling when I read it,

_John,_

_This is yours._

_Don't lose it!_

_Don't lend anything to anyone._

_C._

"Is Colonel Phillips always like that with you?" asked 715.

"Most of the time," I replied.

It was Cameron in her most ultra-blunt,laconic manner,which until you got used to it, could come over like she was a couple of thought processes away from executing someone. She wasn't really like that,at least not when she was around me, there was actually a wicked sense of humor behind it. Cameron was dark and funny. I missed everything about her like hell.

715 brushed the back of my wrist. She must have sensed and understood what I was feeling because her voice became gentler but there was still a trace of sarcasm, "May I? Don't stress; I'll put them right back all safe and sung."

715 took out a pair of scissors. She cut a sheet of paper into squares, which those deft metal fingers quickly folded into origami figures and shapes, about an inch or so high and she placed them over the diagrams of tunnels and chambers, the layout of the bunker she'd been drawing.

She effectively made me pop-up model which represented Infantry, Special Forces positions and key installations such as a dangerously overloaded nuclear reactor, time displacement equipment and she warned me, there were other places which she'd marked out containing heaps of dead bodies, Connor's enemy, and the remains of their busted –up defending robotic army. I pictured them in my mind like an exterminated ants' nest. 715 had described them with a similar lack of concern.

It was at that point my concentration began to drift. She'd been briefing me for over an hour. Up until then I 'd paid attention, I had complete working model, if I closed eyes I could 'see' it all from any angle or perspective, in my head, in full 3+1 D.

I started to reconsider her chassis, the geodesic optics, the bullet groove in the side of her skull-she was as authentic any weapon dug out the ground from a battle site, and I could imagine a battalion of robots like her advancing, sweeping their human targets with plasma fire, striking absolute fear and mayhem into their ranks before they fled or died. In that respect her design, to instill terror, made sense.

.Of course this raised another question-what living person donates their mind to animate one of these chassis? You'd probably have to be so critically injured or dying to agree to it, or would you? I thought of what I'd been told about Connor-was this the kind of thing a dictator would enforce on, vulnerable members of his populace?-But, if so, why go to the trouble of designing and such a complex and elegant and so human-like frame, why not construct your soldiers to any one of the other robot's designs, such as the walking bulldozers down in the Collection Rooms? They appeared "anything proof".

I returned to considering my notion that 715 started life as a human being – perhaps it was easier for a human mind to coordinate and operate an extremely human-like chassis? If that was the case, what had happened to the original her? Surely the personality in there was more than Herbert Marcuse's postulated Ghost in The Machine, or later derivative hard AI theories of individual consciousness and its collective nature within human society?

I believed there was person "in there", who must have had parents, lovers, perhaps even children before becoming this. For a while I thought about the concept in Eastern religions of the Hungry Ghost, bodiless spirits who return to earth craving the taste of food, the livings' sense of touch, and all the sensual pleasure, pain and every-day physical experience we gather though our senses and mostly take for granted when we are alive. She could sense, but I doubted she could feel the texture of that pen in her hand. Just to think of it made me grateful for the armrest of the chair under my fingers and sensation filtered air in my nose and in my lungs.

"Reese!"

"Huh?"

"What did I just say to you?"

"Sorry I don't know, I was thinking about something."

"Then will you pay attention, please." Her optics shifted spectrum to violet blue. They reminded me of cut gems or stars, and I was thinking; that color, that design of optic is absolutely beautiful.

"What's up?"

I decided to level with her," I'm not a soldier. I don't want kill anyone," that was my primary issue.

"Hey, have I mentioned you killing anyone?"

"Not yet."

"All you have to do is open two doors, so is there anything else that's bothering you?"

There was, it had been at the back of my mind all the time she'd been talking .Everything else fitted in the model but this part didn't have the mental "click" of a problem solved, "Where were you, I mean 'where will you be' in the bunker when all this happens? "

715 was the most human-like I'd ever observed her. She put her hand over her mouth to stifle a synthetic yawn and she stretched like a dancer loosening her shoulders. "I'm getting stiff, we need a break, and you've been out on deck so you can take me for a walk."

When I stood up she held out her hand for me to help her up and she put her arm though mine. Then she dropped it on me," and I want you escort me to see Connor's body. I need pay my respects and there's no way I'm going down there again on my own ".

We'd walked out through the area hull where Fitz had shown me. Outside 715 stood with her back to the wall beside the resealed exit , one knee bent and the sole of her foot flat against the wall, ,casual as if she was waiting outside college gates for a ride. We didn't talk and both of us scanned the open universe above our heads.

"What are you thinking?" I asked after a few minutes.

""Hmmm…how about there's a hella lot of stars out here?" She scanned around some more, there were no planets in view and I couldn't locate the sun from here. After maybe another minute she said, "So, what know about Fitzgerald?"

I told 715 what I knew; basically what Fitz told me: I described the interface points on her back, my assumption that her whole brain nervous system liked in as a navigation system during a Jump, and that she claimed she's stolen this ship and she and "him" were, to use 715's phrase, life-"partners"…" Do you believe all that Sev?" I asked.

715 shrugged" Kind of makes sense to me, but I'm not sure she stole him, more like she convinced him to let her be its pilot, he chose her, it's a competitive universe out there, I guess." 715 folded her arms went back to stargazing

"What does Fitzgerald want in the bunker what am I opening doors for? Did she tell you ? I asked

715 turned her face to me," Yeah … yes she did."

"So what is it that is so valuable to her? Why can't she open these doors herself? Do you believe her story?"

715 sighed, "well let's put it like this; if she hadn't convinced me I I'd be figuring out how to kill the skinny space freak ,get you and me off of this ship and blow its engines out of its ass before it gets anywhere near Earth."

I felt that wave of icy fear roll over me again, like it had with the shadows in the museum, "Just tell me you're not even considering, thinking of anything like that, please."

She pushed herself off the wall and stretched like a cat. Casually she said, "No I'm not, and you promised me a walk." She held arm out for me to link through it.

"So what does Fitz want?" I asked.

715 gently trapped my arm against her side ,she pulled her combat jacket collar up and tucked head down into it, as if there a cold wind blowing over the deck

.She didn't answer my question. We walked in silence.

We weren't that far from the nearest side of the ship. A safety rail ran as far as I could see, made from the gray material, and to me it looked a copy of the kind you find liners and supertanker back on Earth. I think it was there there for us. I leaned on the rail and peered over the edge. Straight down, miles after the hull of the ship ended, was infinite distance and it was directly under my feet. Even though I held on the rail, if I shut my eyes I felt like I was falling into the abyss of it.

Looking along the deck we could see clear to the engines. There was no curvature of horizon, little atmospheric distortion under the shields. About halfway along the normal four dimensions; the "3+1" of space-time broke down, it became the shifting geometries and normally impossible Escher lines and planes I seen on my way in on the shuttle .The engines were distorting the space and time around them and against the backdrop of un-warped space It looked like heat and fume blasting out from a massive exhaust, ripples and waves eddied and swirled bending and shrinking hundreds of thousands of miles of open space per second. That's how fast we were moving. The whole thing the process and ship itself appeared ugly and industrial. I actually felt 715 and I could be on a pier of a dirty Pacific oil refinery at night

715, stepped a few paces in front with her back to me, I thought she wanted to have a better view of the engines.

I babbled off a theory, "this has to be an advanced variation on the Alcuberrie Drive. He wrote theoretical papers in 1994 in which he describes an engine acting as a' tensor'-it compresses the space at the fore–expands the aft, effectively it creates a space-time bow-wave ridden by a warp bubble …and that was what we can see beyond the shields distorting the immediate space-time."

I thought she'd be interested in Alcuberrie, but she stayed rigid. I tried to lighten it up, "Hey, Sev , did you know Alcuberrie actually wrote to William Shatner informing him that Gene Roddenberry more or less guessed it right about warp drives and there wasn't a warp theory as such before Star Trek?"

She kept her back to me .The cold-fire dust and particles flashed and sparked on the shield. With no warning she yelled, "FUCKING BASTARD!" at the void, so loud, on Earth it's echo would have bounced around the deck like a bullet's ricochet.

I walked up to her, reached out to put my hand on her shoulder. "Sev are you alright?"

Before I even touched her she'd spun around, her face right in mine, eyes blazing red," No I'm not fucking alright. I want to cry…but that's something I can't do. I need to see his body, now."

"I'm sorry, look I'm well out of line here, I honestly didn't understand how much Connor meant to you, you gave me the impression you weren't keen on him." I'd chosen my words carefully -in fact I'd assumed from how they'd spoken of him, 715 and Cameron and her team actually detested him, but I didn't want to say that.

715 regained some of her composure " no, I'm sorry , you were telling me about warp drives and some guy called William Shatner, he's a 20th Century actor, isn't he?

"Doesn't matter, I honestly didn't realize Connor meant that much to you."

I didn't see her move. This time she'd grabbed the sleeves of my jacket. I had no idea how strong she was until now. Her voice became a quiet controlled shout, "John, I want you to promise me you will never let power and regret eat away at you, It's corrosive, it destroyed even a man like him, and you- you will not listen to a fucking cabal of sycophantic advisors, or the bitch-pit of wannabe wives- like the ones he gathered around him .Those last years, I watched him die from inside. Have-got that?"-

I nodded, I tried to hold her hands but she gripped my wrists and there was no way I could move. She tilted her head, never taking her' eyes' off me, "I asked if you understand what I just said."

I was totally confused about why she was angry with me, I just wanted to go the mortuary with her and get the visit over. I presumed she was deeply upset and grieving and I had waffled on about Star Trek. Her eyes burned like a demon's in the dark." I suppose you're right," was all I could think of to say.

She let go with one hand and pressed it against my cheek , "No Reese, that's not good enough , I said you must promise me you will never this level of power overtake you and turn you into someone him ." .

I just gazed back at her letting her read my utter incomprehension as to a reason for her behavior, "Yes, I heard and understood you, if it ever happens to me I won't let it do that," I said. Not that I believed I'd ever be exposed to this level of power, it's not exactly the kind of hierarchical toxicity an assistant university professors experiences is it? Which is where I believed my career was to take me, but I was trying to reassure her, bring her down enough to walk among the shadows.

715 let go, she brushed my arms as if she was straightening the creases out of my sleeves and she placed my arm through hers again, "now stand up straight for me and escort me like you actually mean it," she said and without her saying another word we walked toward the side wall behind the turret, where the hull allowed us to pass through into the mortuary corridor.

She sat down and I opened the drawer for her. Connor's body was as it had been when I'd viewed it. He was preserved and the hole in his forehead gaped.

She was silent for a long time, and I know it sounds stupid but I imagined her with a human expression as I watched her body language. When she brought her hands together it seemed as if she was getting ready to stand up and leave.

"What happened to his face? I asked.

715 glared at me over his body but I knew she wasn't angry with me. "Alright Reese, I'll tell you- this is what happens when you dump you bodyguard twenty years in the past and leave her for dead."

I couldn't process what she'd told me immediately and I scrabbled for words, no-one had potentially opened up to me about Cameron like this before, "er, you mean that's what he did to Cameron."

"Yeah that's exactly what the bastard did. We'd discovered TDE, it was all a new science, Connor figured his enemies would use it for an assassination attempt on him attempt back in the 1990's. He'd already taken and trained Cameron up from an early age to full Special Forces spec., imagine if he'd programmed her for it. He sent her back in time to protect himself, she was going to pretend she was his foster- sister, live with his family, Connor had it all worked out.

The lights went on in my head "That's what Cameron meant when she told me never been to school, but she could pick anything up, learn anything."

"Yeah, that's exactly it, but things didn't work out as planned. Two Star-crossed teenagers?…They fell in love, that once in a lifetime bells ringing under a billion candle-lights kind of love."

"Falling in love with Cameron, I can absolutely understand that."

"No you can't, you mother is accepting and understanding. Connor's mother hated Cameron and she objected like hell to her being there. Do you know what she did? She allowed John to be transported into the future for his safety. She and Cameron had run into contact and after John had been shipped out his mom left Cameron for dead in a basement in a factory in LA. Everyone presumed that was the end of it, except none of them figured how determined she was, you see Cameron is like this cat you can dump in Washington and maybe it takes years but it always finds its way back to your house in LA, and get this Reese; she's badly injured, damaged but she figures how to use the enemy's TDE , except she gets one bit of the math wrong and when she shows up and it's three weeks before Connor's wedding,… she's forty years too late and Connor's on his third wife… the avaricious controlling bitch…"

715 pointed to Connor's scarred face,…"and'-this' happens when you leave you bodyguard your lover, your life partner for dead in a basement in 2007 fucking looked out for Connor like she did -she took bullets for him and kept him alive, and she devoted herself to him and she absolutely loved and adored him-imagine what she initially felt when finally turned up in 2044. Someone had screwed up, he was nearly killed, and he didn't want to know her.

Perhaps this wrong moment but I wanted bring things back down to a level again, "so that 'contact'; is that why Cameron has a metal plate in her skull?"

Ran hand over her own scar, "she told you about that?"

"Yeah, she did, she said she ran into some 'bad shit and woke up with it'."

715 Ignored my question, or at least changed tack," listen to me Reese, Connor's new wife wanted Cameron terminated but Connor held out and found her a role in Special Forces, she made another life for herself starting as a Private and eventually she became Colonel Phillips. She had friends for the first time, but there was never anyone else after Connor, and she didn't expect it… and then out of nowhere you show up and she's like' no way, pinch me-I'm fucking dreaming'."

"Why-why would she do that?"

"Why not? 715 replied bluntly.

I didn't have time to think of an answer, because she immediately followed by getting up and saying, "Hey, come on Reese, I've spent the last three hundred years on Mars getting my ass sandblasted, contemplating Connor, existence the universe and everything – I don't want to waste any more processing on him or stuff like that, I've made my decision, close the drawer please."

As I did she'd asked and she said "goodbye," once and with absolute finality. At the time I thought when she said her "decision" she simply meant she wanted us to leave the mortuary. What she'd told me about Cameron was more than I'd ever worked out before and it fitted with that precise click into its place. I wanted to think about it.

As we headed back to my room the shadows watched from the corners of the hallways and the sides of the cases. I deliberately put my arm around 715's back to ward them off, and I know It sounds archaic and superstitious but as we walked down the long corridor I kept repeating to myself in my head," we will fear no evil." It was that fucking scary.

When we got back to my room she lay down on my bed on her side, on "her" part of the bed. she said, "Hey this isn't creepy or weird-this is what our human comrades in Section 7 do for us. I can't technically sleep but the next best thing is if you lie down next to me, put your arms around me .I'll be awake but I'll drop into a lower energy mode, it's…relaxing, I need some time out ,do you mind?"

I got in next to her and held her as she'd asked. She was warm and it wasn't uncomfortable. I rocked her very gently in my arms; she seemed to want me to.

Her voice was dozy and a little slurred. "Mm, thanks, what are thinking?"

"About gravity wells," I replied.

She opened her mouth and yawned, "Are they in Shatner-series-thing, I mean, Star Trek?"

"Maybe, but I don't think so," I replied as softly as I could, and I smiled because, big bad war machine she was, this was like trying get an over-tired child to go sleep and after paying her respects to Connor 715 deserved low-energy respite. I imagined Hitch holding her like this and letting her rest.

Fitz would be awake in few hours and functional and I had many questions to ask, like "why the fuck do I have been down there to open those doors for her?" That still totally bugged me.

I wasn't so lucky with my sleep, every time I shut my eyes I saw Connor's smashed face and that single good eye of his, glaring up at me, cold , emotionless, green as hard frozen ice. I stroked 715's arm and wrist until the image of him in my mind finally faded. I held her tight-my own bad dreams were nothing, because god alone knew what she'd witnessed and what nightmares ran though her darkness.

And, you think I was that stupid. Actually I don't blame you if you do. What if I told you, when a rational mind is in this situation and you're confronted a lifetime's persistence of truth, and it's so overwhelming, it's comes at you out of the depths like Great White? It's actually very much like trying to stay awake, not to be dragged down into an abyss of darkness.

Easy me for me to write all this now, I didn't guess " 715" was training me how to deal with "Cameron" in that hour down in the bunker. She hadn't told me yet, but 715 would to teach me a technique to evade her sensors. For one hour I was going to have to lie my ass off Cameron, never allowing her know I had even the faintest idea what she really was, or who I am. Cameron was going to have to make the most profound choice any living being on the planet has ever made in our evolution, and as I later found out, as my mom once said," the future's never fixed."

That's how fucked-up and desperate this mission actually was.


End file.
